m 

m m 



jagg 



rang 








--"—' 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



§P(pqu.*r.'. %ijtt$t If*-.. 
Shelf. .P.Z-R3 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



' 



^Slll 



BfJWS 



p?*# z^r 



pp 





iflffi^ 



ml m 



av/. 



Mi 



•: 






1|1|^ 






IF 









'".■ I 



THE 



PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 



AND 



OTHER SERMONS 



BY 



CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D 

Pastor of the Madison Square Church, New York* 



R 30 1385 /? 



NEW YORK 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

9OO BROADWAY, COR. 20th ST 



}or covoftsttj 

WAtBIWOTOWj 



?3 & 



COPYRIGHT, 1885, BY 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY. 



EDWARD 0. JENKINS' SONS, 

Printers and Stereotypers, 

20 North William St., New York. 



ROBERT RUTTER, 

Binder, 
116 and 118 East 14th Street. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. — The Pattern in the Mount, i 

II.— Human Spirit and Divine Inspiration, . 17 

III.— ^Coming to the Truth, 31 

IV. — Walking by Faith, 44 

V. — Walking in the Spirit, 59 

VI. — Methodical Piety, 73 

VII. — Piety and Business Compatible, ... 90 

VIII.— Christian Love, 107 

IX. — Light the Outcome of Life, . . .120 

X. — Prosperity a Test, 135 

XL— The Unjust Steward, 151 

XII. — The Pharisee's Prayer, 166 

XIII.— The Good Samaritan, 180 

XIV. — The Hidden Leaven, 193 

XV. — Things Seen and Things not Seen, . .211 
XVI. — The Life There Continuous with the 

Life Here, 227 

XVIL— The Perfect Peace, 240 



I. 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 



" Look that thou make them after the pattern that 
was showed thee in the mount." — Ex. xxv. 40. 

THIS occurs in the course of a lesson that the Lord 
was giving Moses on architecture. The tabernacle 
was not yet built. This lesson had primary reference 
to the tabernacle and its furniture. Moses when he 
went down from God on Sinai knew what he was go- 
ing to build and how he was going to build it. The 
tabernacle was with him already a fact, a mental 
fact — as real a thing to him then, I suppose, as it 
was afterward when it stood out upon the plain a 
palpable affair of rams' skins, goats' hair, and shittim- 
wood. The thought of a thing, the conception of it, 
is its first half and largest half. It is easier to pour 
in the molten iron than to make in the sand the mould 
into which it is to be poured. In the idea, the taber- 
nacle was already finished and furnished. He had now 
only to go on and set up upon the ground in forms 
of wood, linen, and metal, the structure that in his 
mind was already forecast and divinely complete. 



2 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 

This will yield two or three lessons that will serve 
us practically. I want, in the first place, to say some- 
thing generally about plan and pattern and purpose — 
" Look that thou make them after the pattern that 
was showed thee in the mount. " It is not so clear 
how God drew for Moses the design and working- 
plans for the tabernacle. The story only lets us 
know that he went down from God with a definite 
notion of what was to be done and how he was to do 
it. He did nothing till his plan was clear and ripe. 
He did not go to work at random and let a purpose 
develop from experiment. He planned from his 
work, and worked from his plan. This lets me say 
something broadly about plans, and about plans of 
life. As I look through Scripture I discover that the 
men who did the best work and the most of it, first 
wrought out in thought what they were afterward 
going to work out in act and word. Noah, Moses, 
Solomon, Jesus, the Baptist, Paul, are examples in 
point. The Creator himself wrought out first His 
creative designs. In that sense the world is as old 
as God. When at the end of the first week He said, 
"All very good," He meant by it that things had 
now become in fact what they had first and forever 
been in idea. " Let us make man in our image," 
permits us to overhear God drafting His design of 
the man that was to be. All good work is the execu- 
tion of plan, somebody's plan. 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 3 

Nothing, perhaps, comes nearer God's workman- 
ship in this respect than art ; hence our habit of 
speaking of the creations of art. The painter puts on 
canvas what has first been a live fact in his own 
thought. Beauty is prior to the brush. Canvas is 
the convenience of the layman, not the exigency of 
the artist. Paint is the accident of beauty, not its 
substance. I want we should be familiar with the 
fact that reality is prior to the shows it makes of it- 
self, whether in fine twined linen, brick, or pigment. 
The painter works from his pattern. The more 
complete the inner picture, the more perfect may 
be the outer. In other arts it is so. Music is the 
expression in score and in sound of a prior music 
that has no relation to ear or staff. Raphael's 
picture represents St. Cecilia as entranced by the 
music that is inaudible. Every musician, so far 
forth, must first be a St. Cecilia. The modern 
architect, like the one on Sinai, sees the building he 
is going to construct before the timber has been cut 
or the ground broken. Gerard von Rile, six hundred 
years ago, saw the cathedral which has just been com- 
pleted beside the Rhine at Cologne. Slowly since 
the year 1200, German artisans have been copying 
into stone Von Rile's thought, working from his 
plan, and the cathedral is perfect to-day because it 
was perfect then. 

All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an 



4 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 

eternal idea come to utterance. The tree ripens to 
the grade of a purpose that was ripe before the tree, 
and before the Third Day. It is all one whether we 
say that the plan is deposited in the seed, or that God 
builds the plant each moment against the pattern of 
His thought, as the mason lays bricks close to the 
plumb-line. It all sums up into the same result. 
There are no planless seeds, no purposeless scions. 
They follow a plan. Nature works from a copy. 

With such examples of pattern and purpose before 
us, I want to go on and say that there are at least 
three advantages that come from having a plan in our 
life and work, and working and living from that plan. 
One is, that in an open field and with a long prospect 
our purposes will lay themselves out in a larger and 
wiser proportion than when framed at close quarters 
and at the dictation of momentary impulse. Men do 
better things and work at a higher level when they 
coolly determine what they are going to do, than 
when they let daily circumstances determine it for 
them piecemeal. It is safer to work by calculation 
than by caprice, and if it is not one it will be the 
other. A man is better and wiser in the long reach 
of his thought than in the short reach. A poor pen- 
man will make a long stroke more gracefully than he 
will a short one. We think better long thoughts and 
purposes than short ones. We can more easily take 
our direction to the next village when we are on the 






: 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 5 

hill than down in the hollow. Men get lost in the 
woods because there is no room for a long look. We 
substitute by the sun or the compass. The captain 
brings his ship to Liverpool in less time by having 
the whole course settled at the outset than by settling 
a little of it every day. A man's longest purposes 
will be his best purposes. It is true, life is short and 
uncertain ; but it is better to live on the short arc of 
a large circle, than to describe the whole circumfer- 
ence of a small circle. Better be Von Rile and see 
only the first stones laid of a cathedral that will be 
by and by the glory of a continent, than to design 
and build the whole of a house that you will yourself 
have to see repaired and replaced. The ocean pilot 
sets the prow for an unseen port. Laboring toward 
distant aims sets the mind in a higher key, and puts 
us at our best. If a man builds a lighthouse from a 
plan, he will construct it high and strong enough to 
answer the purpose of a beacon when the storm is 
beating and the breakers dashing ; otherwise he will 
equal it only to calm weather and still seas. We are 
certain to get lost amid the little circumstances of 
every day. No act, however long, is safe that does 
not match a thought that is still longer. The intri- 
cate details of living will confuse and mislead, unless 
we keep to the pathway of long meridian lines. Im- 
mediate results are meagre results. The men who 
are doing most for their own day are such as are work- 



6 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 

ing toward an aim that is a score or a century of 
years away. In the days of American slavery the 
poor fugitive reached liberty by walking toward the 
stars. 

Not only shall we think wiser and grander purposes 
when we mature them in advance ; there is also a 
solidifying and invigorating power in a long purpose 
clearly defined. You can generally tell from a man's 
gait whether he has a purpose. Plan intensifies. 
Pursuance of a purpose makes our work solid and 
consecutive. Plan concentrates energies as a burning- 
glass does sunbeams. Shiftlessness is mostly only 
another name for aimlessness. Purpose directs energy, 
and purpose makes . energy. When we see the 
target we stretch the bow. Light in the eye is 
tension in the arm. We can, because we think 
we can. Power is with a good deal of accuracy 
measured by purpose. A man may draw inspira- 
tion from the grandeur of his own aims, as a fire- 
fly shapes its flight by its own flashes. To-morrow 
will depend upon to-day : yet at the same time to-day 
in a sense depends upon to-morrow. What to-morrow 
is in my purpose, to-day will to some extent be in my 
act. In architecture the spire is anticipated in the 
foundation, and so determines the foundation. It is 
very slovenly living that is not controlled by anticipa- 
tion as well as by memory. We can not do to-mor- 
row's work to-day, but we can have to-day's work 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. y 

shaped and buttressed by what we are intending to 
do to-morrow. In a life which has meaning in it, 
past and future sustain each other. In an arch the 
stones on this side are kept in place by the stones on 
the other. When we step upon a bridge we are up- 
held as well by the abutment at the farther end as by 
that at the hither end. We have to acknowledge that 
our plans do often get thwarted, but, if you will in- 
terpret the words carefully, there is not so much 
hazard in framing long purposes as short ones. The 
longer will be less endangered by opposing circum- 
stances. It is something in this respect as it is with 
a long keel at sea, which will easily cut the waves by 
which a shorter craft would be foundered. 

Then, in the next place, knowing with definiteness 
what we are attempting to do is a moral safeguard. 
Purposelessness is the fruitful mother of crime. Not 
purposing to do something that is good is practically 
equivalent to a purpose to do what is bad. Adam 
fell when he had nothing particular to do ; and the 
first step in the scheme of redemption was to set him 
at work. When men live only in conference with 
circumstances lying next them, they lose their bear- 
ings. To draw another illustration from the sea. 
When a vessel is lying-to, the man at the wheel will 
seek to avoid drifting by at least holding the ship's 
prow toward port. The house that was empty, say 
the Scriptures, immediately became the domicile of 



8 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 

eight devils. Satan recruits his ranks from vagrants. 
The tropics will yield more crime to the square mile 
than the temperate zones. The less we are pampered 
by nature, the stauncher we are in our health and our 
morals. The kingdom of heaven is more accessible 
to a busy man, and a man with a long thought and 
purpose. We are overworked? Better overworked 
than underworked. Emptiness is full of Satan. Swift 
water is sweet water. The velocity with which a ball 
is shot keeps it from the ground. Electricity will 
keep to the wire till it reaches a break in the wire. 
Labor is the handmaid of religion. Purpose is what 
gives life a meaning. We need to preach a doctrine 
of works not only, but a doctrine of work. Paul 
taught both. The men that were called to the apos- 
tleship, so far as we know, were laborers. It has been 
so in all times and in all kinds of apostleship. A 
drifting boat always drifts down-stream. 

If there be any young man here that is doing noth- 
ing in particular, and with no particular purpose, the 
chances are as ten to one that he is settling toward 
the bad. It is the principle of the bicycle that it is 
kept erect by its velocity. Men who know no Scrip- 
ture but " let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die," are the men that fill our penitentiaries. Young 
aimlessness is the seminary of old iniquity. Even 
the Gospel is more readily embraced by a man that 
is busy. It was when Peter was fishing that he heard 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 9 

the Lord, and followed Him ; and so his companions. 
Paul found it easier to start a church in Thessalonica 
than at Athens. He made it his rule to preach where 
something was going on, and pushed for live centres 
and busy people. A cord gives out no music except 
when it is strained. So in our modern congregations 
the hard-worked men, as a rule, make the best hearers. 
Employment, therefore, is a subsidiary means of sal- 
vation, because it stimulates to purpose. Out of 904 
convicts received at the Michigan State prison in the 
three years ending 1880, 822 (91 per cent.) were un- 
skilled laborers — had never been taught how to work. 
Such facts challenge the attention of the Church as 
well as of the political economists. Character, pur- 
pose, and apprenticeship will never get far apart from 
each other whether among immigrants or native popu- 
lation. 

But Moses not only approached his work with a 
purpose and a pattern, but brought down his pattern 
from on high. This is our second lesson : " Look 
that thou make them after the pattern that was 
showed thee in the mount. " This teaches that there 
are celestial ways of doing earthly things, and that 
human success consists in getting into the secrecies 
of God's mind and working in the direction of His 
method. Human success is a quotation from over- 
head. Men are enriched with presentiments of the 
way God would work if placed in our stead. These 



IO THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 

presentiments we call ideals. Human soil is marked 
with divine foot-prints. An ideal is a pattern shown 
to us in the mount. Ideals we do not make. We 
discover, not invent them. " In the mount," we 
reach after them and ascend to them. They are a 
continuous firmament that overarches us, but a 
clouded firmament that yields itself to us only in 
broken hints. 

There is a good deal in this matter of ideals. While 
we are looking so intently on the ground in these 
days, many things overhead are slipping our vision. 
Sometime we are going to know that we lived closer 
to the unseen than we ever would or dared suspect. 
Hints and flashes fall athwart us that we do not make 
and that we can not explain. In our ideals there is 
something we have never put in them. They are as 
real as the sky, and as certainly overspan all experi- 
ence as the sky overspans the ground. We can not 
reach them any more than we can the firmament, but 
everything measures its length against them as things 
mundane measure themselves against the firmament. 
And so our ideals are never filled, never satisfied. We 
always find faults in the sweetest song, flaws in the 
choicest poem, blemishes in the finest architecture, 
frailties in the most perfect human life. Have we 
ever given to this our careful regard? We have 
criteria of power, beauty, and purity that surpass all 
we have seen in others or felt in ourselves. What is 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 1 1 

the explanation of these criteria? Whence have 
come to us our ideals ? Whose authorship are they ? 
We watch Moses coming down from the mountain 
with his scheme of a tabernacle and we ask him 
where he acquired his scheme. And we hear the 
Lord saying unto him,." Look that thou make them 
according to the pattern that was shown thee in the 
mount. " 

Have we lived so long, and has it never occurred 
to us to wonder what it is against which we measure 
all we see and do ? We have never seen a thing that 
was perfect. What use have we then for the word 
" perfect," and what do we mean by calling this and 
that imperfect ? What is that perfect against which 
we measure the imperfect and find it imperfect ? It 
is a fair question, and you will have to go into the 
mount with Moses before you can answer it. You 
draw a circle and say it is not a perfect circle. And 
it is not. The perfect circle has not been drawn. 
It is not in nature to disclose it, nor in art to produce 
it. How does it come that you talk so familiarly 
about the imperfect circle as though you knew the 
perfect and had seen it, or felt it, or applied it as a 
criterion to such as are imperfect ? And how about 
the perfect v life? Have you discovered it? How 
about the perfect man ? Have you seen him ? And 
yet you say of this man that he is not perfect, and of 
that act that it is not perfect. And what is the sense 



1 2 THE PATTERN IN THE MO UNT 

of it if there is not some sky purer than the ground, 
some mountain higher than the plain, down from 
which the unmade criterion, the unmeasured pattern 
has slipped ? 

There is nothing in which men have so much faith 
as in their ideals, and there is nothing whose validity 
it is so impossible to demonstrate. You can reach 
the sky with your staff as easily as you can reach the 
ideal with your logic. We need to think up into this 
matter carefully. There is something in Moses hav- 
ing a pattern given him in the mount that he brought 
down with him into the plain that never ceases to 
have significance to us. We are close to the edge 
here of the things which are unseen and eternal. 
Men can talk materialism fluently with their lips at 
the very moment that there are great solid masses of 
Platonism lodged in their hearts. Laws, also, we do 
not make ; we find them. Moral laws are exactly as 
much beyond the reach of our manufacture as phys- 
ical ones. Truth we can not enact one whit more 
than we can gravity. 

It may be an old legend and a childish myth that 
the Decalogue, like the pattern of the tabernacle, was 
given in the mountain. But if there were no such 
story in Scripture, we should have to invent some 
such story now for convenience of statement, if noth- 
ing more. When we have said that right and wrong 
are not things that a man, or any number of men, can 



THE PATTERN IN THE MO UNT. 1 3 

invent, we have said for substance all that the Bible 
has to say about God, Moses, and the two tables. 
The best things are not dug from the ground, nor 
framed in a cabinet-shop. The best way to outgrow 
materialism is to look overhead and draw deep 
draughts from out the clear. We see, not make. 
The best thinking is only successful getting into the 
track worn by the thoughts of God. The wisest man 
we are not afraid to criticise, for there is a wiser than 
the wisest and a better than the best. We can all 
look higher than we can any of us go. I can not 
make my conscience say " yes " or " no." My con- 
science reaches as much higher than I as Sinai slopes 
up higher than Arabia. Conscience is individualized 
Sinai — the little mount where patterns get shown to 
me from God ; and I would as soon think of apolo- 
gizing for this mode of representation as of buttress- 
ing the granite pile on which God met Moses, and no 
sooner. Consciousness of God precedes conscious- 
ness of ourselves. The mountains make pictures 
against the background of the sky. My sin is the 
black spot which my bad act makes, seen against the 
disk of the Sun of Righteousness. Hence religion 
and sin come and go together. 

Our thoughts are at home among the stars even 
while our feet sink deeply into the sand. The soul 
is by nature Platonic and Pauline. Plato's "idea" 
answers to Paul's things unseen and words unutterable. 



14 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 



The Greek word for man seems to mean " the up- 
ward looking one." There is more in the air than in 
the dirt. The first circle is the eye ; the next the 
heavens. The eye matches the vaulted blue. The 
patterns are shown in the mount ; and it is the gist 
of life to shape those patterns into forms of wood, 
brass, gold, and behavior. Architecture grows from 
a heavenly datum ; so music, painting, and character. 
The problem of life is to make the ideal real, and 
convert the divine at the summit of the mountain 
into the human at its base. Prophecy consists in 
catching the best of God's thoughts and telling 
them. The scientist is prophet when he spells out a 
new word of God in the air or on the ground. Mind 
watches for the Everlasting. Christ pointed to the 
lilies and the sparrows, and David to the clouds and 
constellations. 

Laws of nature are God's thoughts thinking them- 
selves out in the orbits and the tides. We are ideal- 
ists. Feeling goes deeper than thinking. Wonder is 
prophetic. The philosophy of dirt will be no match 
for the idealism of the Nazarene and the Tarsan. 
Half of New York stood out in the rain all Evacuation 
Day for the sake of an idea. Materialism has a heavy 
stint before it even in New York City. Man is in 
God's image. It is not easily forgotten. The old 
echoes are long in dying. Even the coin with which 
the drunkard pays for his cups has a church creed 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 



IS 



stamped upon it. " See that thou make them after 
the pattern that was showed thee in the mount/' 
That command comprises all commands. It enjoins 
it upon us to make the ideal real ; to be men in a 
divine way. Once it has been done : in Galilee. The 
ideal and the real meet in Jesus. He could say, 
" Follow me." " Be ye therefore perfect/' He said 
to the men about Him. " Looking unto Jesus/' wrote 
the apostle. 

Moses copied from the pattern seen in the mount. 
We have to build not a tabernacle, but a life and a 
character. For our convenience pattern has become 
person. Our model is the perfect man Jesus. How 
much interval is there between me and what the per- 
fect man would be, and do, in my circumstances ? 
Apply it to purpose. Put in your place, what ends 
would the perfect man pursue ? What are you aim- 
ing for more than for anything else ? Is it an ideal 
aim? Phrase it differently; was your aim Christ's 
aim? Put the perfect man in your place to-day, 
would your aim be his aim ? Because it is difficult 
to be perfect, have we concluded that it is not feasible 
to try to be perfect ? Does our Christianity at all 
consist in this, that we have turned ourselves to God's 
grace because we do not like God's model? The 
tabernacle in the plain, the pattern on the mount. 
When I look at my own heart, my friends, I am 
afraid we have, a good many of us, been different 



16 THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT 

from Christ so long that we are growing reconciled to 
the idea of not becoming increasingly like Him. Be 
careful not to measure yourself against your neigh- 
bor. Call no man master. One is your Master, even 
Christ. 



II. 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRA- 
TION. 

" There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of 
the Almighty giveth them understanding'' — 
Job xxxii. 8. 

YOU will appreciate upon the instant, I am sure, 
the closeness with which the two clauses of our text 
are related, and the fitness with which the first stands 
as introduction to the second. " There is a spirit in 
man, and the in-.s^zW/-ing (inspiration) of the Almighty 
giveth them understanding/' The two words " spirit " 
and " inspiration " are of course only different forms 
of the same word, and the spirit in man is that capac- 
ity in him which enables him to become the recipient 
of the Almighty's inspiriting. It is so much ability 
on man's part to receive a divine inbreathing set over 
against the power there is on God's part to communi- 
cate a divine inbreathing. " There is a spirit in man, 
and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them un- 
derstanding." 

The fact that the Scriptures, and we in imitation of 

(17) 



1 8 HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRA TION 

the Scriptures, use the word spirit to designate now 
some capacity inhering in us, and now some faculty 
exercised by God, only shows that there is between 
God and man some ground that is common to the 
two, a meeting -place. The spirit in man is that 
special apartment of his nature which has been con- 
trived and fitted for personal intercourse between him 
and God, as in the Jewish temple the Holy of Holies 
was chosen and arranged to be just such a meeting- 
place between Jehovah and the High-Priest. 

The spirit in man is to the great inbreathing of God 
what the lungs are to the circumambient air. It is 
to the down-falling light from God what the eye is to 
the splendors of the earth and the sky. It is the ele- 
ment of our being that establishes in us religious 
possibilities. It is what sets us in any kind of appre- 
ciative relation to God, as it is the ear only that sets 
us in any kind of appreciative relation to tone. The 
religious susceptibility and faculty is in this way as 
much a part of us as is the hearing ear, the seeing eye, 
the reflective mind, and the sympathetic heart. It is 
no more optional with us to decide for ourselves 
whether the religious functions of our nature shall be 
exercised, and the spirit that is in us be inclined to- 
ward God in devout receptivity, and bowed before 
Him in reverent worship, than it is optional with us 
to decide for ourselves whether we will bare our souls 
to the baptism of beautiful sights and sounds with 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 19 

which the grounds and heavens are fraught, or to the 
truths and sentiments and passions of the generation 
in whose midst we have our habitation and our life. 
" There is a spirit in man," and, like every other in- 
stinct of our being, it stands to us authoritatively, 
and lays its mandate upon us imperiously. We are 
religious by nature. 

And it is just this faculty divinely wrought upon, 
and this string divinely played upon, that really com- 
poses the strength and tenacity of our religious con- 
victions. The deep secret of our belief in God is not 
that we have been taught to believe in Him, nor that 
nicely assorted arguments have wrought upon us logi- 
cally ; just as we believe in a sun shining in the sky, 
because we feel the visual organ energized by a power 
that is felt to be not of us, but to impinge upon us 
from without, so we believe in God because there are 
ceaseless stirrings and whisperings wrought in the 
spirit-chamber of the soul by influences that we know 
are not of us. 

Perhaps if we thought more about inspiration as it 
is presented for our consideration in this thirty-second 
of Job we should be in better condition to deal with 
the problems connected with the inspired character 
of the Holy Word. The inspiration of the Almighty, 
as this text sets it before our regards, has to do, in a 
purely general way, witfi God's own personal com- 
munication of Himself to us, and, at the spirit-point 



20 HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

of our being, imparting unto us the energies of His 
own wisdom, holiness, and power. It is not our con- 
cern to understand how this is done. It is more in- 
cumbent upon us that we bring ourselves to realize 
that it is in God's order of things that it should be 
done, and in man's disturbance of divine arrangement 
that it is so feebly and so interruptedly done. It 
does not lie along the track of Biblical teaching that 
we should allow to the prophets, apostles, and olden 
saints of God any monopoly of inspiration. There is 
always the possibility of beauty where there is an un- 
sealed human eye ; of music, where there is an un- 
stopped human ear ; and of inspiration, where there 
is a receptive human spirit, a spirit standing before 
God like a flower that waits to have its petals written 
upon with a heavenly pencil of light ; lying before 
God like a harp-string that waits to be stirred into 
trembling and quickened into song. No man can 
have studied his own character attentively, or re- 
garded his own achievements meditatively, without 
realizing that unless there is something entered into 
him that is not originally of him, his most conspicu- 
ous traits are the languor of his moral life, and the 
poverty and insipidity of that life's exterior fruitage. 
And so the first office-work of inspiration is to cre- 
ate in us fresh personal vigor, and new spiritual ani- 
mation. We work at our own characters as a painter 
works at his canvas, and a sculptor at his marble. It 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRA TION. . 2 1 
k 

does not pay. It is only painted canvas and elabo- 
rated marble when it is done. It does not breathe. 
It shows no pulse-beat. Character can not be con- 
structed. It can not be put together. It needs first 
of all a principle that is animated, and one, therefore, 
that is animating. It wants an impulse more glow- 
ing, determined, and passionate than anything we are 
possessed of naturally. It is all a mistake that we 
can not be good and manly without being scrupu- 
lously and studiously good. There is too much mech- 
anism about our virtue. It is rather a fine criticism 
that is passed by a modern admirer of Shakespeare, 
when he writes of him : " We never see Shakespeare's 
characters hanging over their virtues, or nursing and 
cosseting them, as if they were specially tender of 
them, and fearful lest they might catch cold." And 
the same thought works itself out in all variety of 
fine expression and deep suggestion in Pauline ex- 
hortations to high Christian living and doing. We 
need nothing so much as a determining life-force at 
the core of character, and impulse from out the very 
soul of God, that shall hold us in its warm, steady, 
and irresistible grip, and impel us with a momentum 
that has the very pressure of Jehovah in it. And all 
of this is a draft upon the divine inspiration. It is 
exactly as much inspiration as the power John had to 
write the fourth gospel, or Isaiah to compose the 
fifty-third chapter of his prophecy seven hundred 



22 HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION 

years before Calvary. If we have attained to a live 
manliness, and a heart so fed from out the veins of 
the divine life that the throbbings of our heart syn- 
chronize with the throbbings of God's heart, we are 
in no danger. " All virtue to be safe must be enthu- 
siastic/' it has been said, and well said, if we will un- 
derstand by enthusiasm here that which the word 
itself etymologically imports, " God in us " (en Theos), 
It will seem to you quite likely that this is sub- 
stantially what the theologians call regeneration. It 
is that, precisely. The new man, the new life, is only 
another name for character wrought out at the deter- 
mining impulse of a divine inspiration. We can set 
before us as example the fairest life ever ripened in 
the bosom of the Church, or model our demeanor 
even after the consummate pattern of Christ's de- 
' meanor, without attaining at all yet to anything dis- 
tinctively Christian. What we need first of all is not 
to act like Christ, but to have exactly the same Divine 
Spirit working at the core of our lives that worked at 
the core of His, and then acts will take care of them- 
selves. A man can not be manly till first he has been 
divine. All true manliness grows around a core of 
divineness. The inworking of God is the condition 
of all salvation and the substance of it. Inspiration 
is the premise out of which every valid inference of 
manhood is derivative. I wish we could see more 
among men that looked like inspired character — more 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 23 

that looked as though in our daily doing we were 
swept triumphantly onward by God's irresistibleness 
at work in us. How much we do that we should 
hardly do were it not for the speech of people. What 
protracted arguments we hold with ourselves, trying 
to persuade ourselves into the right and dissuade our- 
selves from the wrong. It is not easy to do right. It 
lies with the grain to do wrong. John expresses the 
Gospel philosophy of the whole matter, when he says : 
" Whosoever is born of God doth not sin, for his seed 
remaineth in him, and he can not sin because he is 
born of God "; which is only another way of saying 
that virtue is secure if it is inspired virtue. It is in- 
spired virtue St. Paul is pleading for when he says : 
" Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil the lust of 
the flesh "; and when he says that love, joy, peace, 
meekness, temperance, and the rest, are all of them 
the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We miss it, and incur 
incessant peril when we try to make the flintiness of 
a good resolve do the work of the inspiration of the 
Almighty. Virtue is safe only when it is inspired. 
So that the question each of us has to ask himself is 
not whether we are doing as well or better than some 
one else, but whether something has hold of us that 
is competent to steady our infirmities ; whether we 
have allowed ourselves to be drawn in wholly beneath 
the sweep of the Almighty mind ; whether we have 
got a virtue so divinely impassioned, and a character 



24 HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

so divinely inspired, moral energies so bound into the 
momentum of God's energies, that security is lifted 
to a maximum, and difficulty minimized, till right 
thinking and noble doing and brave daring is, all of 
it, beginning to become with us an accomplishment 
and a genius. 

Another office-work of inspiration is to create in us 
fresh and vivid perceptions of the divine truth. " In 
His light we shall see light. " It is nothing short of 
inspiration that qualifies us to apprehend the truth of 
God's Word. Our prayers often imply as much. But 
in this, as in other matters, our prayers often lie at a 
higher level than our practice or our philosophy. We 
need as much inspiration to enable us to read the 
Bible as its authors needed to fit them to write it. 
The faculty that will solve a problem of geometry is 
not the faculty that will solve a problem of Scripture. 
"The natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God, neither can he know them, for they are 
spiritually discerned." When the Psalmist would be- 
hold wondrous things in the Scriptures he cried to 
God, " Open Thou mine eyes." Which leads us on 
to a word respecting Christian opinion and Christian 
creed. No Christian creed is ever constructed. It 
may grow, but it can never be built. It can not be 
put together from the outside any more than charac- 
ter can. The reference here is not to men's philoso- 
phy of religion, but Christian creed in its closest and 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 25 

best sense. A Christian creed is a matter of the in- 
dividual. It is the form in which he shapes his own 
experience of the things of God and of his own soul. 
It is putting into the vernacular of his own thought 
what God has shown to him of the divine being and 
ways. A creed in its truest sense can not, then, be 
taught, any more than holiness can be taught. It is 
a matter between each man and God, and has to do 
with what God has shown him of himself. In point 
of directness and personalness every true creed will 
be like that of the man whose eyes had been opened : 
" I can see "; inclusive of what he knew for himself, 
exclusive of all hearsay. Being led about, a blind man, 
by those who could see, was no substitute for sight of 
his own. Every Christian creed is like Peter's creed ; 
of which Christ said, " Flesh and blood hath not re- 
vealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in 
heaven "; an inspired creed. We might define a 
creed as the way in which a Christian states to others 
what God has first revealed in him. In this case it 
will be sure to bear upon it a good deal of the man 
himself, his personal idiosyncrasies, just as the books 
of the Bible tell us a great deal about the humanness 
of the men that were inspired to write them. No 
two men will therefore have exactly the same creed, 
except as they neither of them have any creed, but 
borrow from a third who has. 

And accordingly, as we go on to know the Lord, 



26 HUMAN SPIBIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

and obtain from Him fuller and fuller revelations, 
the faster our creeds will change ; just as the more 
rapid our ascent up the slope of a mountain the 
more rapidly will become altered the aspects and 
mutual relations of all lying about us and below. 
We must therefore insist on a great deal of liberty 
here. If a man has received anything from the Lord 
we want to hear it, without asking too many ques- 
tions as to whether what he has received is the exact 
duplicate of what you and I have received ; in fact, 
the more his revelation differs from ours, if so be it 
be a revelation, the more valuable does he become to 
us as a prophet of God. We want then to see a 
goodly number of young men coming into our 
churches and pulpits who are in telephonic connec- 
tion with God, and who succeeded in getting through 
college and seminary without parting with their men- 
tal and personal idiosyncrasies. When the sun is 
shining on the falling rain the air is full of rainbow, 
and no two eyes see the same. This is what will give 
us a progressive theology. Theology is not dead. 
Its possibilities of life and growth remain as long as 
men continue getting deeper and deeper into the 
things of God. Every new and deeper glimpse we 
gain of the hidden things renders obsolete our past 
glimpses. There, too, forgetting the things which are 
behind, we want to reach forward unto the things 
that are before. There is probably not one article in 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 27 

your creed or in mine that we shall read a thousand 
years hence exactly as we do now. And it is a thing 
to make the angels laugh, were it not also so sad as 
to make them weep — the easy flippancy with which 
men still in the primer of God's wisdom pronounce 
themselves in theological finalities; set up a little 
Sinai for the arbitrament of doctrine in perpetuo ; 
and incapable, as all men of course are, of letting 
their thoughts broaden out to the scope of God's 
truth, venture, with conspicuous immodesty, to con- 
strain God's truth within the limitations of their 
thought. But the end of theology is not reached. 
She is not dead. Obituary is not in order. Chris- 
tian thinking will continue growing better, deeper, 
truer, so long as Christians, along the luminous path 
of God's self-revelation to them, continue getting 
into the deeper things of God, and the closer inti- 
macies of God. " There is a spirit in man, and the 
inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understand- 
ing." 

But only once more : The inspirations of the Al- 
mighty are suited to become to us qualification for 
all kinds of holy doing. We make toilsome work of 
being good because we do not let the inspirations of 
God work in us, and we make irksome work of doing 
good because we do not let the inspirations of God 
work through us. There, too, we are strangers to our 
privileges and traitors to our prerogatives. The world 



28 HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION 

is full of divine energy, energy material and energy 
spiritual, and it all waits to be used to our human 
empowerment. And our inventors and mechanics 
and manufacturers are incomparably more prompt in 
availing themselves of the physical energies of God 
than we are in adopting into our spiritual work His 
spiritual energies. They, the mechanicians, the world 
over are harnessing the cosmic forces of the world 
into our busy world's work ; water is carrying our 
mills, wind is transporting our merchandise, steam is 
drawing our trains, electricity is running on our er- 
rands. The industries of the world are all of them 
leaning back upon the willing might of God. Ninety- 
nine per cent, of all the fruits of human industry, so 
called, are nothing other than the physical energies 
of God, abroad in the sky and the earth, utilized to 
the production of staple commodities ; and I wonder 
if there is not divine spiritual power that is waiting 
to energize itself, but that is kept out of the service 
by men's unfaith in its utility, and men, workers in 
the cause of Christ, wearing themselves out, shorten- 
ing their lives, and exhausting their powers, because 
from egotism or unbelief they will operate the ma- 
chinery of the church by their own sheer strength, 
when they might belt the ponderous mechanism of 
the church to the enginery of the sky, and prolong 
their own powers and augment their own serviceable- 
ness, by letting spiritual agencies, like industrial ones, 
be bound back to the dynamics of heaven and worked 



HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION 29 

by the inspirations of the Almighty. Great vigor is 
shown in maintaining with scrupulous conservatism 
the original polity of the church in its externalities, 
methods of administration, modes of operation. But 
it is infinitely less the outward administration of 
method that needs conserving among us than the 
inward administration of the Holy Spirit. That 
was the special and distinguishing glory of the 
Apostolic church, and just in this is our distinguish- 
ing point of poverty ; church machinery enough, 
culture enough in the pulpit, elegance enough in 
our churches, style enough in our service and our 
ritual, but a dearth of Holy Ghost ; too much man- 
power, too little of the inspirations of the Almighty. 
We, as officers and members of churches, pastors, 
deacons, and people, must understand and appreciate 
that it is infinitely less our own personal endeavors 
that signify than it is the opportunity which our per- 
sonal endeavors allow to the Spirit of God to move 
forth and work in His own divine way, and achieve 
His own divine results. And when we are ready just 
to have God use us, He will make us just as mag- 
nificently effective as we are beauteously humble.. 
" It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your 
Father which speaketh in you." " I will give you a 
mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries shall 
not be able to gainsay nor resist." We can not read 
Scripture appreciatively without realizing that it is 
divine power seizing and using consecrated human 



3 o HUMAN SPIRIT AND DIVINE INSPIRATION. 

weakness that has worked the magnificent results of 
the old time ; and that it is the same power, working 
through the same sort of instruments, that alone will 
suffice to repeat old results in the new time. We 
need inspiration, and inspiration with the same ten- 
sion of divineness in it that qualified Moses to give 
the Decalogue on Sinai, or Christ to proclaim the new 
law on the Mountain of the Beatitudes. The demand 
is not for new Scripture, nor for men that can write 
it, but for men that are under the control of the same 
inspiring power that at one time moved men to write, 
and that would move and amply fit men to write 
more Scripture now, if more Scripture were the thing 
needed. " There are diversities of gifts, but the same 
Spirit. There are differences of administration, but 
the same Lord; and there are diversities of opera- 
tions, but it is the same God which worketh all in 
all." So that we are driven back to the declaration 
of our text that our one common and comprehensive 
need is of the inspiration of the Almighty, the direct 
breathing into us of the breath of God, with all the 
wisdom, holiness, and power which such a divine affla- 
tus involves, that whether we speak, be it by word or 
act, we may speak as the oracles of God, and whether 
we minister we may do it as of the ability which 
God giveth ; that God in all things may be glorified 
through Jesus Christ ; to whom be praise and domin- 
ion forever and ever. Amen. 



III. 

COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

" God will have all men to come unto the knowledge 
of the truth'' — i Timothy ii. 4. 

EVERY little while I am approached by some torn 
spirit who is snared in the meshes of his own per- 
plexed thinking and wearied by the assaults of his 
own doubtings and unbeliefs. It has sometimes been 
the case that our private conference together has re- 
sulted in the removal of some difficulties; or, if not 
that, exactly, has resulted at least in getting the in- 
tellectual machinery into smooth running order, and, 
still better, in inducing in the mind a stronger and 
more wholesome tone. And it has occurred to me 
that it will be wise to spend our half hour this morn- 
ing in meeting, at the level of their queries and diffi- 
culties, any who may be in the like circumstance ; 
not with the purpose of taking up any of theit 
specific difficulties and trying to solve them, but 
rather with the intent and with the hope, by the aid 
of the Divine Spirit, of drawing them into a mode of 
thinking and a quality of feeling that shall be itself 

(31) 



32 COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

the solvent of problems, exactly as it is the sun's 
rising that better avails to saturate the air with 
brightness, and to clothe with distinctness the ob- 
jects that stand forth in it, better by far than any 
detailed attempts of our own to brush down the 
darkness out of the shaded corners of the sky, or 
sweep out the patches of mist scattered among the 
valleys and along the hill- slopes. 

And now, my friends, you whose case is especially 
contemplated just now, there is a considerable num- 
ber of points that, in rapid succession, I wish to pre- 
sent to you, and I pray that we may all approach the 
matter with that teachableness and that earnestness 
which can alone comport with the seriousness and 
dignity of the place and theme. 

It is one stone laid in the foundation of the matter 
when it is distinctly apprehended by the doubting 
mind that there is such a thing as the truth. Hardly 
will any mind in the exercise of normal power ques- 
tion it ; and yet it is one thing not to question it, and 
another and distinct thing to confront it and to grasp 
the thought in its depth and area. There is such a 
thing as the truth. And truth, so far as we get into 
relations of knowledge with it, is not a matter of in- 
vention, but of discovery. We find truth, not con- 
struct it. It exists anterior to the human mind. It 
is there though we have not encountered it ; it exists 
though our thoughts have not formulated it. The 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 



33 



truths of science are not true because the foremost 
men of science have concluded and agreed to have 
them true. Truth is no conventional matter. We 
can not enact truths, however we may be able some- 
times to discover them. Truth is as apart and 
separate from the mind that feels after it and ex- 
plores for it, as was America separate and distinct 
from the Genoese navigator, the Spanish coast from 
which he weighed anchor, or the Santa Maria on 
which he sailed. All our language implies as much 
when we cross-question it, and all our reasoning con- 
sents to as much when pushed by sharp inquisition. 
Men who do not think carefully sometimes allow 
themselves to suppose that because opinions differ 
and even antagonize, therefore truth is a figment ; 
but an opinion is at best a truth humanly reflected, 
and will depend for shape and complexion very much 
upon the medium through which the truth shines, 
and the ground upon which the truth lights and re- 
bounds. Truth and opinion are radically distinct. 
The reality of truth is self-contained. Misapprehen- 
sion does not modify it ; failure even to surmise it in 
no slightest manner interferes with it. Far up on 
the cold, untravelled heights we are sure the little 
Alpine flower is blooming, though no foot has trod- 
den there. The star twinkles in the sky with the 
same substantial lustre, though no science has con- 
jectured it and no telescope has brought it within 



34 COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

reach of the human eye : so with the undiscovered 
suns and constellations that throng the still deeper 
firmament of truth. Whether you do not apprehend 
the truth aright, or do not apprehend it at all, the 
truth is there, positive and self-subsistent, and you 
will find that this way of regarding the matter will 
help bring your thoughts to order, and give to those 
thoughts resolution and nerve. 

Another consideration that will tend to similar 
results will be this : that, although the truth may be 
difficult to apprehend, and in instances without num- 
ber utterly elude detection, nevertheless there is a 
correspondence between truth and the mind ; in a 
mystic manner the two are related to each other. 
There is such a thing as a mental appetite, and truth 
satisfies that appetite. The two are made for each 
other. Such adjustments the world is everywhere 
full of : light and the eye ; sound and the ear ; beauty 
and the taste ; the bird's wing and the atmosphere. 
The mind is hungry for facts. The child knows 
enough to look a question before ever he has words 
enough to ask it. Even wondering why a thing is, 
is the mind's unconscious sense of power to under- 
stand why a thing is. Even wonderment is the ad- 
vanced guard and the light artillery of philosophy. 
Curiosity is thought on its entering edge. Desire 
presumes power. The very passion to solve a prob- 
lem quietly attests the rudiments, at least, of a genius 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 35 

capable of solving it. To desire to understand a thing 
means already that the mind is working close along 
the level of the thing it would understand. Even 
interest in a matter implies a congeniality between 
us and the object of our interest. Longing is uncon- 
fessed capacity. It is the downward reach of our 
thought that loads it with momentum for an upward 
reach. We find God with our thought because there 
is something of God already in the thought with 
which we push out after Him. It is the music in the 
ear that finds and interprets the music of the orches- 
tra. Some one has said, " If the eye had not been 
sunny, how could it look upon the sun ? " Deep 
answers unto deep. The upper and the nether firma- 
ment speak in the same vernacular. At the same 
time that you get into the deep places of your own 
soul you get also into the heights of God. The stars 
beam up into your eyes from the bottom of the sea. 
Passion, conscience, and reason will deal as loyally 
by you as you will deal loyally by them. Believe in 
your strongest thoughts ; heed the deepest voices 
that speak to you from within, for the word of the 
Lord is in them, as the murmur which flows from out 
the Swiss valley is the sound of the Alpine storm 
and of the thundering avalanche fallen into a whisper 
at the level of human ears and habitations. 

The third suggestion, which I am sure will, if re- 
garded, help release you from your perplexities, will 



36 COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

be, that you yield respect and obedience to so much 
of truth as you are already persuaded of. Consider- 
able of what passes as current unbelief is only the 
result of the habit men are learning, and the power 
they are acquiring, of thinking for themselves. I am 
inclined to suppose that there is more intelligent 
faith, more reasoned faith, more working faith, there- 
fore, to-day than there was thirty years ago. That 
so many men are abandoning old doctrine, now that 
people are thinking for themselves, hardly argues 
that faith has suddenly become weak; it rather 
indicates what a feeble hold these doctrines really 
had upon men before they had learned to think for 
themselves. That a tree is upturned when the wind 
blows means not that the wind has weakened the 
tree, but that it has revealed the weakness already in 
it before there was any wind. So that when a man 
discovers, after independent investigation, that his 
creed is considerably shortened, he is to understand 
by it, not that he has suffered a loss, but that now 
for the first time he has really detected how little 
creed of his own he ever had. And there has been 
a great deal of such discovery. By a great many one 
doctrine after another has been questioned and dis- 
carded : the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine 
of atonement perhaps, the doctrine of prayer as a 
moving influence with God, the doctrine of immor- 
tality, and, it may be, even that of God's personality. 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 37 

With these subtractions made there seems to be very 
little left. That depends upon what you mean by 
little. If you have in your yard a tree heart-eaten 
and loaded with dead branches, with only foliage 
enough upon it to remind you how nearly dead the 
entire tree is, and yet with a fresh, sap-filled little 
scion shooting up from the base, you will be of the 
mind, most likely, that the scion without the tree is 
worth more than the scion with the tree, provided 
only the scion springs from a sound root. But when 
all this trunk of belief has been felled, and there re- 
mains only some single little shoot of a doctrine, is it 
orthodox to suppose that that shoot will suffice to 
save the man ? I hope so ; and yet that is not so just 
a way of putting it. It is less a matter of the scion 
saving the root than it is of the root being sound 
enough to save the scion. So it is less a question of 
the single doctrine saving the man than it is of the 
man being sound enough to save the doctrine. So 
that when a man tells me that whereas he used to 
believe all his parents and church taught him, he now 
believes only one thing, all I want to know is, not 
what that one thing is, but how he treats that one 
thing — whether he stands by it, and whether, if the 
pinch came, he would die for the sake of it. Just as 
fast as we live all that we believe we shall believe 
more than we live. You can not deal untruthfully 
by yourself at one point and then expect to win truth 
for yourself at another point. 



38 COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

Another point for you to consider is, that you will 
never succeed in arguing yourself out into the clear 
and up into the light. The heart as well as the 
intellect is an organ of discovery. I do not know 
how it has come about that we are instructed to be- 
lieve everything that the mind says and nothing that 
the heart says. All great discoveries are made by 
. men whose feelings run ahead of their thinkings. 
The disciple who recognized Christ first at the Sea of 
Galilee was the disciple that loved Him best. The 
heart has eyes that the brain knows nothing of. In- 
tuitions contain an ingredient of the emotional. Sci- 
ence and philosophy broaden forward into poetry at 
their outer margin. " Language is fossil poetry," for 
the reason that every thought was once a poem. 
The mind must have a cause, but the heart must 
have a Father. With your eye you scan your friend's 
face, but with your heart you know your friend, and 
absorb inspiration from him. Thought is like the 
printer's type ; heart is the ink that fills the type, and 
puts upon the page strong lines and brimming sen- 
tences. To intellect every word is a finality ; to the 
heart every word is a symbol, a symbol of meaning 
unexpressed, of meaning not quite expressible. 

And you want to come to the truth, not only with 
the heart, but with a clean heart : " The pure in 
heart shall see God." Preferences, cherished sins, 
unholy ambitions, self-seekings, are all the time weav- 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 39 

ing clouds in the soul's atmosphere that darken the 
brightness that would otherwise so illumine the soul 
and nourish its potencies. Sin soils the spirit's deli- 
cacy, and unwillingness deadens its susceptibility. 

My next recommendation to you is, that if you 
want to become clear and strong in your religious 
faith and convictions, you will do best to get into 
personal relations with men who are pronounced in 
their religious faiths and convictions. And there are 
two advantages that flow from this sort of personal 
contact : the first is that a truth appeals to us much 
more effectively when it is wrought into the tissue of 
a living man than when it comes to us merely as a 
verbal utterance, or addresses itself to our eyes in the 
shape of a written sentence. Theory is well enough, 
schedules of doctrine are well in their way, but we 
are never quite touched by truths till they become 
flesh, and dwell among us ; nothing saves like incar- 
nation. There may be some among us this morning 
that do not believe in Christianity as a system, but I 
doubt if there is a person among us who does not be- 
lieve profoundly in a man who consistently embodies 
that system. To be more specific : perhaps you do 
not believe in prayer, considered in the abstract ; yet 
it is hardly probable that you do not believe in the 
prayerfulness that your mother, now sainted, used to 
evince in the prayers she long ago offered for you at 
your bedside when you were a child. It by no means 



4 o COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

follows that because a man does not quite accept 
Christianity as a scheme that can be written on paper, 
he does not very heartily respect it and very cordially 
fellowship it as it was lived in the flesh by his sister, 
mother, or wife. That is one advantage, then, in 
close relation with men of faith ; the barren form of 
faith disappears in the fresh, personal reality of faith ; 
the doctrine reappears as a life, with lines and edges 
all dissipated. Hence almost all the Bible is a series 
of crystallizations about living men ; and we are act- 
ing quite in the spirit of Scripture when we represent 
Christianity not as a set of truths formulated by 
Christ, but a body of principles gathered up into Him 
and lived by Him ; so that the most just and stimu- 
lating ideas that we shall obtain of Christianity will 
be by contemplating Christ as He appears in the 
Gospel, and by coming close to men that are the best 
reproductions of Him as they walk our streets or 
meet us in our homes. 

But there is a second advantage accruing from con- 
tact with men of pronounced Christian faith and con- 
viction. A considerable portion of religious incerti- 
tude and doctrinal indifferentism is the outcome of 
the low state of the system — moral system, I mean. 
Thought takes hold of truth only in an irresolute way 
because there is in the process none of that personal 
strenuousness and moral determinedness that makes 
the mind muscular and every movement of the mind 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 41 

full of nerve and grip. Moral tone will give a man 
doctrinal tone. If you are in that condition of mind 
indicated by saying that you do not know what in 
the world to believe, it is probably not chargeable to 
intellectual confusedness primarily, but to moral de- 
bility ; by which I do not mean immorality necessa- 
rily, but something that in the moral man is analo- 
gous to what in the physical we should call a low 
state of the system, reduced condition of the blood. 
And if you are in any such state (and great numbers 
of people are), and you find all your opinions and 
ideas slipping down in incertitude, the best escape 
from it will be to put yourself into personal relation 
with, and under the personal domination of, some 
great, robust, nervy soul, not for the sake of copying 
his ideas, nor for the sake of letting him put a prop 
underneath your ideas, but for the sake of letting 
him magnetize you, revivify you, reproduce himself 
in you ; and that will work on your ideas and give a 
stamina and grasp to your thoughts, and a reach and 
an insight to them, very much as, after a drought, the 
rain works among the discouraged grass-blades and 
moping wheat-stalks, nourishing them, and so stiffen- 
ing and strengthening them. It is a great, stalwart 
soul that qualifies a man to think great, stalwart 
thoughts, and if you have not such a soul, come as 
close as you can to the man who has, and you will 
become richer without his being made poorer. 



42 COMING TO THE TRUTH. 

I will add to the foregoing only this last sugges- 
tion, that you let your escape from perplexity be 
conducted in ways of severest honesty and most 
painstaking sincerity. You are familiar, I presume, 
with the lines of Tennyson : 

" He fought his doubts and gathered strength ; 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them : thus he came at length 
To find a stronger faith his own ; " 

all of which is practical and feasible ; yet every step 
of the way must be taken in artlessness and candor. 
You will not attain to the truth along any by-path 
of chicanery. Do not try to believe anything more 
than you can believe easily. Ideas will not grow any 
faster, nor convictions shape themselves more rapidly, 
for being hurried. In one way or another you will 
have to pay for it if you try to compel a given 
amount of argument to yield more than a corre- 
sponding amount of persuasion. Be honest with your- 
self, then. Be honest with your neighbor. Never 
dress the infirmities and deformities of your belief in 
phrases of finery borrowed from the hymn-book, the 
catechism, or the Bible. If there comes an occasion 
for stating your belief, state it for just what it is 
worth. Above all, be honest with God. Do not pray 
to anything you do not believe in. If you do not 
believe in a personal God, never pretend that you do ; 



COMING TO THE TRUTH. 43 

never pray as if you did. Tell no lies on your knees. 
When Horace Bushnell lost his personal God, he re- 
covered him by praying to the next best thing that 
was left, the abstract principle of right. It was a 
dreary kind of devotion, but it was sincerely meant, 
and a voice came to him, and a revelation broke upon 
him. Put, then, into your prayers no more ortho- 
doxy than there is in your thought. If you can not 
address Him as a known person, approach him as an 
unknown Something; if you can not feel him, be 
contented to feel after him ; if you can not see him, 
look in the direction where you conjecture that he 
may be. If you can not fly, walk ; if you can not 
walk, creep ; if you can not creep, stand and wait : 
"they also serve who only stand and wait." Every 
morning the daybreak comes to us, not we to the 
daybreak. And so, my friend, in fine, trust the 
deepest movings of your soul ; live true to your best 
conviction ; pray only up to the level of your faith ; 
lay aside all perturbation and insincerity; wherever 
you see what looks to be sunshine, stand in it ; and 
your sky will certainly clear, and your day will as- 
suredly come. Every unhindered needle verges to 
the pole ; every unstopped river empties into the sea. 



IV. 
WALKING BY FAITH. 

" For we walk by faith, not by sight" — 2 COR. v. 7. 

We walk by faith, said Paul. And we do. Paul 
meant it in a particular sense. He was thinking of 
religion, the Lord, and the life to come. But it is 
true in his sense, because it is first true in a wider 
sense. We are walking by faith everywhere, and in 
all things. Religion, the Lord, and immortality are 
quite of a kind with other matters, so far as relates 
to our apprehension of them, and mode of becoming 
assured of them. I do not discover that there is any 
heavier draft made on faith in the matter of religion, 
than in other spheres of thinking, living, and work- 
ing. We, all of us, in everything believe a great 
deal more than we know. We are all of us believers. 
I do not say believers in Christ, believers in immor- 
tality, but believers. We are believers constitution- 
ally. Belief is about the first instinct that shows it- 
self in us. Most, at any rate, of the knowledge we 
have was belief before it was knowledge. 

It seems strange that men should find so much 

(44) 



WALKING BY FAITH. 



45 



difficulty with the faith element in the Gospel, seeing 
we are in such hourly familiarity with it on other 
ground. I have thought that perhaps by consider- 
ing the matter together a little, relief might come to 
some of us who are prejudiced against religion be- 
cause it taxes faith so heavily. We have got to deal 
gently with people here. All minds do not work 
alike. Believing is more natural to some than to 
others. Some men wish they could believe more than 
they see their way clear to believe. Christ never 
hurried nor crowded men's faith. Let His manner 
be to us always an example. The Catholic Church 
offers to take charge of men's faiths. Some enter 
that communion as an escape from perplexity; like 
Alexander at Gordium, do not see how to untie the 
knot, and so cut it. I trust we shall be guided here 
to the utterance of words that shall prove helpful to 
them that are in sincere need of help. 

We walk by faith ; not by sight. We walk not 
seeing where we are going. We can think things a 
little ways, but can not think them to the end. We 
can not tell it all ; can not prove it all. It is so in 
matters of religion ; equally so in other matters. 
We run presently against an interrogation point, in 
whatever direction we go. These interrogation points 
stand in thick circuit around about us, and that 
circuit we call our horizon. There was a veil in the 
old Hebrew tabernacle. That veil we now call 



46 WALKING BY FAITH, 

horizon. It is the same thing. There is something 
outside of your horizon? You judge that there is; 
you act as if there were. Something behind the 
curtain ? We expect so ; we act as if there were so. 
We can not think things to the end, but what lies 
between our farthest thought and the end really 
makes out a large part of life's weight — in other 
matters, at any rate, even if not in religious ones. 

When the sun is sliding up over our horizon, we 
believe the half of it we can not see. Faith and 
knowledge touch, almost touch — only the horizon 
line between. The world moves a little on its axis, 
and the line slides along the sun's disk and faith 
flashes into knowledge. That is faith : supposing, 
feeling, resting in what we can not see. The Bible's 
definition of it is that ; almost the only definition the 
Bible gives ; and that not of a kind to mean much to 
us till the New Revision put upon it its retouch : 
" Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the con- 
viction of things not seen "; living in the confidence 
of things we can not prove. That we do so much of 
that in religion is made an argument against religion. 
We can not see a soul. We have no premises large 
enough to yield us God in the third term. We can 
not demonstrate immortality. And men with whom 
it is not natural to feel ahead of their thinking get 
troubled by this. When you have entered an un- 
lighted room in the night, and have groped your way 



WALKING BY FAITH. 47 

about in it, as you approached the wall you probably 
felt its nearness to you even before your hand reached 
it. It is a singular kind of intuition. Most men 
have it. It is in the physical realm a good deal 
like what faith is in the mental and spiritual, feeling 
running ahead of thought, and resting in what can 
not be seen. A part of our infidelity and atheism is 
mental habit. Certain occupations and professions 
embarrass faith. Dealing with men inclines us toward 
faith. Dealing with things inclines us away from 
faith. And so while William Humboldt was a be- 
liever, his brother Alexander wrote the Cosmos, and 
left God out of it. 

To any thinking man here, then, whose sharp think- 
ing does not bring him nearer God and the Bible, 
but away from it, I want to illustrate that while faith 
is an important factor in religion, it is just the same 
important factor in everything else. We live in all 
respects by our convictions of the things we can not 
see. Every step we take anywhere we take in faith. 
We step down upon unknown ground with no knowl- 
edge of what lies an inch under the surface. Not a 
footfall but takes much for granted. That is a near 
and just picture of what holds everywhere. We see 
one per cent, and assume ninety-nine. We go but a 
little ways before we bring up against the unknown. 
We treat the unknown as though it were known. 
That is faith, treating the unknown as though it 



48 WALKING BY FAITH. 

were known. We are continually cracking the 
shell to get at the hidden meat. When you 
step aboard a train, how much do you know of 
the man whose hand is on the valve? A thou- 
sand lives go speeding along the track, forty 
miles an hour, and that one man holds those lives in 
his hand. Do we as Christians live by faith in the 
Son of God ? Yes ; and so on the railway-train you 
live by faith in the engineer ; and so on the steamer 
you live by faith in the man on the bridge. It is one 
thing. We walk by faith. We ride by faith. And 
all along the line are men whom you do not know ; 
flagmen, road-repairers, yet in whose hand you put 
your life. You ride by faith. On the fidelity of the 
man at the switch depend a hundred lives and a mil- 
lion interests. " But somebody knows him." O yes. 
But you don't. That is the point. You travel by 
faith. You walk by your conviction of the things 
you can not see. We take men at their word. Are 
men false? Not nearly so much as they are true. 
Otherwise society would be impossible. No faith, no 
society ; no faith, no trade. Faith is among men 
what gravity is among planets and suns. Count 
Cavour said that the man who trusted men would 
make fewer mistakes than the man who distrusted 
them. 

We should never get a single day's work done if we 
stopped to prove every step. The element of faith 



WALKING BY FAITH. 



49 



and of daring enters into every successful life. Busi- 
ness can go on on the street because men believe in 
each other. That is why you will not deal with a 
man on 'Change whose word is not as good as his 
bond. If the business-men of this city should com- 
mence to-morrow morning to walk only by sight, 
there is not a business interest in the country that 
would not be flat before nightfall. Shaken confidence 
in men has always been the prolific mother of mer- 
cantile disaster. And so when Paul says, " We walk 
by faith," we will remember that faith plays in relig- 
ion only the same part as that with which we are 
made daily familiar in the concerns of society, the 
home, and the street. 

I might say a word about science in this connec- 
tion. Science is like society and trade, in resting at 
bottom upon a basis of faith. There are some things 
here, too, that we can not prove, otherwise there 
would be nothing that we could prove. Science is 
busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither- 
end. It is a mistake to contrast religion and science 
in this respect, and to think of religion as taking 
everything for granted, and science as doing only 
clean work, and having all the loose ends gathered 
up and tucked in. We never reach the roots of 
things in science more than in religion. To begin 
with, What do you know about yourself ? I am just 
as much of a mystery to myself as God is a mystery 
3 



50 WALKING BY FAITH. 

to me. You can tell me what you do, and what you 
think, and what you feel ; but about the "you" that 
does, and thinks, and feels, you can not tell me the 
first thing, and you do not know the first thing. You 
can not prove your own existence, and still less, your 
identity, from day to day. To take another illustra- 
tion ; our whole judicial system would be without dig- 
. nity, strength, or coherency, if it were not generally 
supposed among men that there is such a thing as 
right. But there is not one of us that can prove 
there is such a thing as right. Thought instantly 
loses its way. We feel it, we walk and live by the 
conviction of it, but can no more bridle it with our 
logic than we could fence God or the celestial spaces 
with our logic. 

Our infirmity does not disturb us here. We stand 
by faith ; we walk by our convictions of the unseen. 
Faith is a faculty we have of being stayed by the un- 
proved. Indeed, we can not prove that there is such 
a thing as the sun in the sky. We daily feel a bright- 
ness here, and assume a bright thing there in order 
to explain it. Or if you choose to say that your eye 
actually shows you the sun, the only difference is 
that now you believe what your eye tells you, instead 
of believing what your inward mental impression tells 
you. You have faith that your eye tells you no lies. 
Faith ! And if you had as much faith in what your 
inner sense tells you about God, as you have in what 



WALKING B Y FAITH. 5 1 

your outer sense tells you about the sun, you would 
stop questioning. And why shouldn't you have? 
Do you know of any reason why you shouldn't have ? 
Again : all our prognostication is based on faith in 
nature — faith that nature will act to-morrow as she is 
acting to-day. All the expectation we have that 
there will be a sunset to-nirfit and a sunrise to-mor- 
row morning, leans back directly on our faith in na- 
ture. The sea-captain trusts the magnetic pole. He 
does not see it nor know what it is, but he trusts it. 
The whole ship's cargo depends on the faithfulness 
of the needle. We assume that it will behave as 
other needles have behaved. Commerce, then, is 
rendered possible by faith. It is a great jump from 
knowing that nature has been uniform to supposing 
that she will be. A great deal of what we know as 
science is only faith, that has leaned so long as to 
have become oblivious of its supports. 

We do not understand God, soul, and immortality, 
any better than they were understood five hundred 
years ago, and it works rather to the detriment of re- 
ligion if it is supposed that nature has been having 
its mysteries cleared up during that time. In science 
men keep making discoveries ; but I do not under- 
stand that we are any nearer explaining things, get- 
ting to the end of things, than we were when Thales 
pondered and Aristotle explored. If we have en- 
larged our horizon, it is only to find how much un- 



52 WALKING BY FAITH. 

suspected room there is for new horizons outside of 
our own. The same enlarged telescope that makes 
stars of the first magnitude more distinct, brings into 
view a few thousand more of the twelfth magnitude. 
The frontiers of the universe keep running away 
from us. Chemistry has taken a drop of water, and 
resolved it into its two elements, that is, she has split 
one fact in two, and given us two mysteries, where 
before there was but one. Science does not bring us 
to the end of things, nor to the beginning — rather 
sets us farther away. Once it was six thousand years 
back to the beginning, now it is as many million. 
The doctrine of evolution, whether sound or false, 
has not explained our origin, only postponed it. 
Science has not solved difficulties, only shifted the 
points of difficulty. 

Much of scientific discovery is only generalization 
of difficulty, as when Newton made gravity cover 
the phenomena of the sky as well as of the earth. 
We do not dissolve our ignorance by designating the 
matters we are ignorant of, by a Latinized nomen- 
clature. Saying that the earth is sustained by grav- 
ity, is a good deal the same thing, only in a more 
refined form, as what the ancients said when they 
rested the earth on an elephant, and the elephant on 
the back of a tortoise. I confess that it is an im- 
provement, only (and this is the point we are on) it 
has not cleared up anything. So far as relates to ex- 



WALKING B Y FAITH. 5 3 

planation, and to getting to the end of the matter, 
it makes very little difference whether we spell our 
theory " Tortoise,'' or " Attraction of Gravitation." 
It is much as Byron says in his " Manfred," that 

" Science is 
But an exchange of ignorance for that 
Which is another kind of ignorance." 

We might express it by saying that we are becoming 
more and more learnedly ignorant. 

And, my hearer, if it happens that your mind rebels 
against faith as something that is at variance with 
wholesome intellectual action, and under the ban, of 
all that is scientific, and mentally discreet, I wish you 
would, with that in mind, read largely of our stand- 
ard works of science, late or early. Take such a work, 
for example, as Darwin's " Origin of Species." To 
me one of the most impressive features of the book 
is the ease and good humor with which in it science 
and faith get along together. I do not mean his 
faith in God — perhaps he had none — I mean his faith, 
his constant walk by the assurance of things hoped 
for, by the conviction of things unseen. That is faith, 
and Darwin had that in proportions that were simply 
colossal. He had a magnificent faith in his theory, 
the theory of Evolution. He could not prove the 
theory, and he knew he couldn't, and what is more, 
he continually confessed that he couldn't. Over and 



54 WALKING BY FAITH. 

over again, with all the simplicity of a child, he ad- 
mits that his convictions run away ahead of his proofs. 
And it is so in all of these books so far as I am fa- 
miliar with them. Their conclusions are a great deal 
larger than their premises. That is not spoken in 
a critical spirit. I am not finding fault with Evo- 
lution, nor with Mr. Darwin's book. I am only say- 
ing that he was a man of immense faith ; he could 
not have written as he did if he hadn't been ; he 
reached results without stopping to be logical ; that 
is faith. He had faith, just the same kind of faith 
that Isaiah had, only exercised toward his doctrine 
instead of exercised toward God. If he had been 
as disposed to walk by the conviction of an invis- 
ible God as he was to walk by the conviction of 
an undemonstrated hypothesis, he might have turned 
out as sublime a prophet as Isaiah, or as superb an 
apostle as St. Paul. I have no controversy with Evo- 
lution. Men object to religion because it is such a 
tax on faith ; and I only want you should look di- 
rectly at the fact, that in the priests of science, faith, 
just such faith as Peter and John had, is a distin- 
guishing feature — in fact it is to faith as much as to 
anything that their supremacy in the priesthood of 
science is due — and if the faith of Darwin, of Tyndal, 
of Huxley, of Haeckel, of Herbert Spencer, had been 
as sublimely exercised toward God as it was toward 
the conjectures engendered in their own brains, there 



WALKING BY FAITH. 55 

. would have been power enough in them to found in 
the middle of the nineteenth century a second Church 
of the Apostles. 

Besides this, you will, I think, be helped to regard 
religious faith with more respect if you will consider 
the mental calibre of some men who have been relig. 
ious believers. I do not mean that this is a matter 
that can be settled by ballot. We are not going to 
vote God in or out by show of hands. Only if you 
have a suspicion that faith is a euphemism for intel- 
lectual debility, facts are at hand to controvert the 
suspicion. Daniel Webster died at Marshfield, Oc- 
tober 24, 1852. I had the privilege awhile ago of 
seeing the original paper on which, under date of the 
tenth of that month, he penned a few lines of con- 
fession. At the top of the page are the words from 
Mark, " Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief." 
Underneath, among other sentences, is this : " My 
heart has always assured me, and reassured me, that 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a divine reality/' 
In some sentences of Bismarck's occur these words : 
" The firm stand that for ten years I have taken 
against all possible absurdities of the court, I owe 
purely to my decided faith. If I were not a Chris- 
tian and a firm believer^you would never have had 
such a chancellor. Take away from me my relation 
to God, and I am the man to pack up to-morrow and 
be off for Varzin " (his ancestral estate). Gladstone, 



56 WALKING BY FAITH. 

whom we so easily think of in connection with Bis- 
marck, has spoken with far more of tenderness and 
effect. In the department of literature are to be 
cited the names of Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe. 
"Jesus Christ was more than man," said Napoleon. 
Prof. Tyndal, in an address to English workingmen, 
has within a little time not only explicitly denied that 
he was an atheist, but went so far as to say that in 
view of the daily wonders of nature, " only a shallow 
man " (those are his words) " can be satisfied to be an 
atheist." It was one of the last utterances of the 
late physicist, Maxwell : " Every good and every per- 
fect gift is from above, and cometh down from the 
Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning." In opening his school at Peni- 
kese Island, Agassiz gathered his pupils around him 
and said : " It is becoming that we first of all bow in 
the presence of the Infinite One, and thus recognize 
His sovereignty, superlative wisdom and benefi- 
cence." Other names which belong in the roll of il- 
lustrious scientists who were at the same time relig- 
ious believers, are such as Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, 
Newton, Cuvier, Herschel, Owen, Faraday. As I 
said, we are not calling the ayes and noes on the 
question of God and no God, only such a list of 
names illustrates that strong mental grasp and strong 
faith-grasp can coexist easily and pleasantly; that 
there is therefore no inherent antagonism between 



WALKING B Y FAITH. 5 7 

the two, so that if we have keen intellects and are 
unbelievers, it is something beside our keen intellects 
that causes us to be unbelievers, and the most prac- 
tical and impressive question we can ask ourselves, 
is what that something is. 

And now to this same hesitant class of hearers 
there is one other thing I want to say in behalf of 
faith. It is not intellectual debility : that we have 
seen. On the contrary (and this is the point I want 
to make), on the contrary, faith is the very heroism 
and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity, 
but a faculty. Faith is power, the material of effect. 
Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great work- 
men of history have been men who believed like 
giants. Take the eleventh of Hebrews, that famous 
roll-call of God's men of faith, and the men that 
made events for two thousand years are all in it — 
Noah, Abraham, Moses, Gideon, David. And ever 
since then the men that have helped the world for- 
ward and wrought great effects in the world, have 
been those who have lived by the power and fascina- 
tion exerted upon them by the things outside their 
horizon, by the power of unseen things flung up upon 
their sky in mirage. Standing upon the shores of 
Spain, Columbus reasoned upon the driftwood borne 
in on the western tide, but there was a million times 
more in his conclusion than there was in the drift- 
wood. His winged thought had reached the great 



58 WALKING BY FAITH. 

West before the Santa Maria weighed anchor in 
Palos. Faith discovered America and made Colum- 
bus more royal than the crowned heads of Europe. 
Faith is the heroism of intellect. Nothing would 
ever have been done in the world if before the deed 
the doer had waited to calculate all the elements in 
the case and compute all the contingencies. Every 
great effect and grand discovery begins as an inspired 
guess. The best things have not been reasoned 
out, but conjectured. As some one has said, " New- 
ton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon 
was a leap of the imagination. ,, Such an imagination 
as that of Columbus or Newton, is but another name 
for faith ablaze. My friend, if you have not faith- 
power enough to outrun your thought, you will not 
have deed-power enough to overtake your thought. 
Faith is not debility nor phlegm. Faith is mind at 
its best, its bravest, and its fieriest. Faith is thought 
become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's 
great passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its 
transfigurement. Don't you dare think one disre- 
spectful thought of faith. The power of grand living 
and superb doing is all in it. Think on these things ; 
brood over them, and may the power of the Great 
Unseen put its spell upon you, the invisible continent 
cast itself up upon your sky in mirage, holding your 
ship's prow onward, forever onward to the great 
West, till you stand down on the new shore, hope 
ripened into fruition, faith flashed into vision. 



V. 
WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

" But if ye be led by the Spirit ye are not under 
the law." — Gal. v. 18. 

In approaching the matter of the Spirit's guidance 
and control, there are two facts to which we shall do 
well to hold closely, to the end that our study may . 
prove disciplinary to heart as well as to intellect, and 
to the end also that our regards may draw closely to 
that Lord about whom it is so essential that our 
thoughts should centre in these days of reflection and 
sacramental preparation. 

One of these facts is, that the Spirit, under whose 
leadership our text recognizes the Christian to be 
placed^ is a person. The personality of the Spirit is a 
doctrine freely confessed by us in our creed, but often 
denied by us in our thought, in our converse, and in ouf 
prayers. We easily fall into the use of non-committal 
terms and neuter pronouns in our designation of Him. 
Though writing Him with a capital we are continually 
substituting by the pronominal " it," and He read- 
ily comes to have with us only the indefiniteness of 

(59) 



60 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

an impulse and the impersonalness of an influence, 
with none of that substantive being, intelligence, and 
will that constitutes the Holy Spirit a true and com- 
plete personality. 

The other preliminary fact to be observed is, that 
this person is in some way the continuance to us, 
under altered conditions, of that same Jesus, who 
once walked among men in visible form, and in the 
utterance of tones that were audible. I have no am- 
bition to dogmatize about it. He came from the 
Father and from the Son. He in a way takes the Son's 
place. In a way He is the Son's messenger. " If I 
go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; 
but if I depart I will send Him unto you." Else- 
where the Holy Spirit is represented as the baptismal 
element, answering to the water with which John 
baptized his disciples.; and still again Christ says that 
He is going to be with His disciples alway, as though 
the Spirit were His own personal prolongation, in new 
ways and manifestations, into the weeks and years 
that followed on after the ascension. We have no 
care to speak any exact words about it, only to enjoin 
it upon ourselves to-night in all our efforts to come 
in more snugly under the dominance of the Holy 
Spirit, to feel that we have not broken with Christ, 
but rather that in letting ourselves be actuated by 
the Spirit, we are liv^ig still under the same personal 
regime as did the disciples who walked abroad through 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 6 1 

Judea and Galilee in the companionship of Jesus ; 
and that if the Holy Spirit were to take upon itself 
form, we should have back with us again in some 
way the same holy person who blessed His disciples 
out at Bethany, and was parted from them in the 
cloud that divided itself over Olivet. 

If ye be led of the Spirit ye are not under the law. 
You perceive that the text has its affirmative and 
also its negative element. In neglecting the latter, 
and addressing ourselves (as is more satisfactory) only 
to its affirmative and constructive aspect, it needs to 
be accepted as our basal principle, that through what- 
ever stages God's government passes, God's govern- 
ment never ceases, and that changes of dispensation 
are not breaks in divine authority, but alterations 
simply in God's method of administering His author- 
ity. This principle is distinctly implied in our text. 
The Jew as such is under the law, amenable to God's 
authority as exercised through Moses : the Christian 
as a Christian is also under a kind of law, amenable 
to God's authority as exercised through the Son, the 
Holy Spirit, — sovereignty, divine sovereignty carry- 
ing its exercise through both dispensations in one 
uninterrupted continuity without hint of break or of 
interregnum. Now the conception we are likely to 
have of Christianity is of a system under which 
there is larger liberty enjoyed than under the system 
of Moses ; and this conception, provided only we as- 



62 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

sociate with the word " liberty " its true notion, is 
justified, and justified by the Scripture. Christ says, 
" If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- 
deed." Paul says, " He that is called in the Lord, 
is the Lord's freeman. " Again, " Where the Spirit 
of the Lord is, there is liberty." He exhorts the 
Galatians, " Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ 
hath made us free." But I question if we are all of 
us, or even most of us, quite careful or accurate in 
the notion we have of the thing called " freedom." 
Freedom is not exemption from government ; rather 
is freedom a form of government. Anarchy, lawless- 
ness, is the opposite of government ; freedom is a 
special variety of government. Political freedom is 
civil authority vested in a particular way. Christian 
freedom is divine authority vested in a particular 
way ; so that in coming out from the bondage of a 
Jew into the freedom of a Christian, there is no in- 
quiry to be had respecting the abatement of authority, 
but only respecting the new point at which authority 
is vested and the new manner in which it is exercised. 
Two or three remarks here before we proceed to 
statements more explicit. Our investigation, then, 
it is easily enough perceived, is not being pursued at 
the impulse of any antagonism on our part to that 
element in the ten commandments that constitutes 
the essential ingredient of the ten commandments, 
viz., the divine will they embody. The will of God, 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 63 

whether written with the finger of God on Sinai, or 
traced with the blood of God on Calvary, — the will 
of God and the blessedness accruing to the man that 
does that will, is one of the bottommost facts of our 
holy faith ; and it is in pure loyalty to that fact that 
our inquiry here is being prosecuted, and any opposi- 
tion that might arise to this method of expounding 
the text would be quite as likely to proceed from 
such as find themselves unpleasantly restrained by 
this form of exposition as from such as are anxious 
to see recognized the Gospel's essential dignity and 
gracious strenuousness. 

Another remark to be made is, that by the terms 
of our text, whatever enjoyable escape may be had 
from the old law, it is to be had only on the condi- 
tion of being a Christian. "If ye be led of the 
Spirit, ye are not under the law." A man may live 
in an age of Gospel, but it does not follow from 
that that he lives under the administration of the 
Gospel. Christ has come into the world, but it does 
not follow that He has come into my heart and set 
up His throne there. The Holy Spirit is abroad in 
society, and there are thousands and hundreds of 
thousands that are being led by that Spirit. It does 
not follow from that that I am being led by it. If I 
am led by it, I am not under the law ; if I am not led 
by it, of course I am under the law. I have not 
escaped the pressure of divine authority at one point 



64 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

until I have first put myself under the pressure of 
divine authority at another point. We read in the 
book of Numbers that a man gathered sticks on the 
Sabbath, and he was stoned at the Lord's command ; 
and our thought perhaps is that God used to be very 
particular. We read in the book of Joshua that 
Achan, the son of Zerah, was guilty of embezzlement, 
and that at the Lord's command he and his sons and 
his daughters were stoned with stones and burned 
with fire ; and our thought perhaps is that the Lord 
used to be very particular. He used to be particular 
to be obeyed. 

There is so much in the New Testament respecting 
love, liberty, and the abolition of old ordinances, that 
we allow ourselves sometimes to be betrayed into 
supposing that the old dispensation was the dispen- 
sation of man's submission to God, and that the new 
dispensation is the dispensation of God's submission 
to man ; that the Gospel is a kind of giving up on 
God's part, a sort of confession that He is not dis- 
posed to be particular about little things any more, 
and that it hardly avails Him to attempt to be par- 
ticular about little things. Now, this conception of 
the Gospel as an economy of divine " relaxation," 
divine "letting down," divine "giving up," is one that 
yields bitter fruit ; it makes the Gospel contemptible 
by making it irresolute. And nowhere in the Scrip- 
tures do I find such evidence of God's inflexibility, of 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 65 

His resoluteness, and determination, that, come what 
will, He will be obeyed, as I do on Calvary. Calvary 
shows us that the Almighty had rather see His Son 
crucified than give up His own holy will. 

Calvary means that God thinks so much of His own 
sovereignty that He would rather have divine blood 
shed than not have you and me respect that sover- 
eignty and come into terms of gentle allegiance to it. 
Calvary proves, by the most thrilling of all possible 
demonstration, that God is as particular to be scrupu- 
lously obeyed now as when He ordered the execution 
of Achan and of the Sabbath-breaker in the old days 
of Sinai. " With Him there is no variableness, neither 
shadow of turning." And the man who discards the 
punctilious observance of God's outward statutes be- 
cause he lives in an age of Gospel, without having 
first submitted himself to the governance of an in- 
ward Christ, and to the laws written by the Spirit 
upon the fleshly tables of the heart, has detached 
himself from God at one point, without having first 
attached himself to God at another point. 

We are prepared, then, to find the government of 
God, as administered in the Gospel economy, as con- 
stant and inflexible in its operations as in its adminis- 
tration under the economy of Sinai ; and we are now 
to examine this new economy of Christ and the Spirit 
somewhat more narrowly with respect to its nature 
and methods. 



66 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

Paul characterizes this new administration under 
which we stand as Christians, as a leading of the 
Spirit: "If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under 
the law." The old administration was an adminis- 
tration of exterior lines that men could see : the new 
administration is an administration of interior per- 
sonal impulses that men can feel. God drew the 
lines. God gives the impulses. Moses was the agency 
then ; Christ is the agency now ; one government un- 
derlying both, one sovereign administrative in both. 
In one case it was government by communicated 
statute ; in the other it is government by immanent 
leadings. In one the law was a thing distinct from 
us, and laid down for us to run upon, like railroad- 
irons spiked and bedded before a locomotive; in 
the other the impulse is a thing inwardly contained 
and inseparable from us, in a certain way like the in- 
stinct of a bird guiding it southward at the approach 
of winter. 

In various ways might this distinction between 
government by applied constraint and government 
by contained motive be illustrated to us. Any bar of 
wood or metal you can balance upon a pivot and con- 
strain into a north and south direction ; a magnetic 
needle delicately suspended in the same way will con- 
stantly constrain itself into a north and south di- 
rection. An applied constraint in one instance, an 
immanent tendency in the other. Although it will 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 67 

occur to you, I hope, that even this immanent tend- 
ency of the magnetized needle becomes operative 
only as celestial polarity makes itself in a delicate 
way inwardly felt. The needle would not move only 
as the heavens move in it. 

Or again — one pupil solves a problem according to 
the rule stated in his arithmetic ; another pupil solves 
the same problem purely at the direction of his own 
mathematical insight. The result may be the same, — 
the steps by which the result is reached may be the 
same ; but in the latter instance the process will be 
purely intellectual, and in the former, to a consider- 
able degree mechanical ; for between such constrained 
operations of mind and the operations of a Babbage's 
calculating machine the points of resemblance are 
obvious and striking. 

This contrast, however, must not betray us into 
supposing that our gifted problem-worker is not as 
amenable, quite as amenable, to authority, as the boy 
who ciphers with his finger on the rule. When a 
man becomes a genius, a mathematical genius if you 
please, he passes out from under the constraints of 
his book, but not from under the supremacy of his 
science. There is no caprice about genius. Genius 
does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, 
but that does not mean that genius is lawless ; in fact 
no mind comes so close to, and into such loyal in- 
timacy with, the very substance of mathematical law, 



68 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

as the free and the gifted mathematician. So far 
from genius discarding law, rather is it the supreme 
joy of genius to re-enact the eternal and unwritten 
law in the chamber of its own intellect. And how- 
ever the Christian, the moral genius, may discard 
systems of detailed ordainment suited to a slow-paced 
Hebrew, so far from a Christian's denying the great 
supremacy beneath which he stands, rather is it his 
sovereign joy to re-enact in the senate-chamber of 
his own conscience the unwritten law that abides 
eternal in the bosom of his Lord. 

I solicit your attention to another feature of this 
prolific illustration. Notwithstanding the disparity 
between our two students, one a genius and the 
other not, one governed by his intuition and the 
other by his book, it is nevertheless certain that in 
the vast majority of instances, if the same problem 
be submitted to the two for their solution, they will 
take the same steps in laboring toward its solution. 
Where the one performs a process of addition (be- 
cause his book requires it) the genius will also, it is 
likely, perform a process of addition, but at a differ- 
ent impulse. When *the first goes through a process 
of division because it is so enjoined in his rule, the 
genius will also, presumably, perform a like process, 
though for a different reason, and for a reason that 
his less gifted companion would scarcely appreciate. 
So that when our talented arithmetician says that he 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 69 

has no personal interest in the arithmetical rules of 
our books, that is not because he has ceased to find 
it necessary in his arithmetical work to follow the 
methods and go through with the processes laid down 
in those books. We have not outgrown the necessity 
of carrying one for every ten in adding a column of 
figures, though we have most likely outgrown Green- 
leaf's statement of that necessity ; and what was the 
outward constraint of our text-book is now the in- 
ward impulse of our intelligence. Moses' law said to 
the Jew, "Thou shalt not kill "; it says nothing to 
me ; for as a Christian I am not under Moses' law. 
It does not follow from that that I am at liberty to 
commit murder. I have not outgrown the obligation 
to refrain from bloodshed, however I have outgrown 
Moses' statement of that obligation. I believe that 
will make distinct matters that careless thinking is 
liable to confound. We may break the two tables 
into as many fragments as Moses broke them into 
when he came out of the mount, but that breakage 
involves no advocacy of murder, adultery, theft, or 
desecration of holy time. 

Moses broke the tables and they were renewed in 
the same form. Christ broke the tables and now 
they have been renewed in a different form. " Ye are 
not under the law if ye be led of the Spirit." To us, 
as Christians, God's handwriting upon stone has been 
replaced by His handwriting upon our hearts. " If 



7o 



WALKING IN THE SPIBIT. 



ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." 
Obedience to God's will displayed outwardly was 
Judaism ; obedience to God's will revealed and operat- 
ing inwardly is Christianity. It was the belief of the 
Jews that God spoke upon Sinai. It was the belief 
of Paul when he wrote our text that the Holy Ghost 
speaks and works constrainingly wherever there is a 
spirit still enough to hear, and willing enough to 
yield, and that the divine presence templed in each 
Christian soul is the one single sovereign to which 
that soul is amenable. 

I do not suppose that this will be interpreted 
by any to mean that Christ pronounces in any pre- 
cise and oracular way upon the various questions 
of right and wrong that daily submit themselves 
to us for decision. Rather is it the conception of 
Scripture that as Christians we have God's seed 
abiding in us ; that our Christianity is a living fact, 
gradually evolving from that seed ; that our Chris- 
tian activities, inner and outer, are all in the nature 
of blossom and fruit, steadily enlarging and grad- 
ually diverging from that same divine and inward 
seed ; that to whatever proportions our Christianity 
may attain, it is all of it the outcome from this one 
divine point, vital and germinal. The vegetable seed 
determines the quality and form of everything that 
flowers out from it. That is why all the parts of a 
blossom are so delicately consistent with each other ; 



WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. ?i 

they all emanate from one point, and are all of them 
therefore loyal to the one living law lodged at that 
point, and carried up and executed by them through 
all their circles and sections of growth. Just the 
thing that always makes a wax flower grotesque is, 
that, while it purports to be the product of a seminal 
unfolding, its numerous incongruities declare it to 
have been the result of an outward compiling ; which 
precisely is the nature of that grotesque thing that 
passes sometimes under the name of Christianity. Our 
man takes one petal from the law of Moses, selects 
another from the Sermon on the Mount ; inserts one 
stamen from the traditions of the church, another from 
the local sentiment of his community, perches all upon 
a stalk of self-interest, suffuses it with an aroma of the 
Holy Spirit, fastens it all together, calls it Christian- 
ity, sets it out, prays that the dews of the divine 
Spirit may water it, and from time to time comes to 
examine it, and wonders why it does not grow, take 
on finer colors, larger strength, and heavier fruit. His 
grand mistake lies in conceiving of Christianity as a 
mixture and a manufacture. Christianity is first and 
last of all Christ in us, inwardly revealed as a law- 
giving direction to our life, inwardly at work as a 
force, developing our life in conformity with that law. 
In this way the entire matter is brought back to 
the point where Paul rested it, to the point of the 
inward, constant, and personal sovereignty of Jesus 



72 WALKING IN THE SPIRIT. 

Christ in the individual soul. It comes back to the 
point where the Lord himself put it, " Follow me." 
It comes back to the point where last of all the be- 
loved disciple put it, that Christianity is the seed of 
God abiding in the human spirit, and qualified there- 
fore, as divine seed, to impose its own law, give its 
own shape, prescribe its own direction, to every stage 
of the Christian's growth, every movement of his 
Christian thought, every deed of his Christian achiev- 
ing. 

My Christian friends, I commend to your prayerful 
consideration this conception of personal Christianity 
as one that I am assured faithfully reproduces the in- 
tent of the Gospel and the mind of Christ. It gath- 
ers the whole matter within one circumference drawn 
from a single centre, and grounds it upon one su- 
preme fact. And, in fine, it puts us upon concen- 
trating our energies of thought, not upon ourselves, 
but upon Christ, as the one focus of regard, and seek- 
ing after Him with our whole hearts as the single 
object of pursuit, certified of this that if indeed 
Christ be formed within us, then will He, in His own 
trusty way, effect within our soul all desired recon- 
cilement of discords, lead us into all truth that is 
needful for us, make His way straight before our 
face, and cause our simplest word and commonest 
performance to be the daily and hourly expression of 
His most perfect wisdom and holy pleasure. 



VI. 
METHODICAL PIETY. 

" Evening and morning and at noon will I pray! 1 
—Psalm lv. 17. 

Nine o'clock in the morning, twelve o'clock and 
three o'clock. Systematic piety. And it is system in 
piety rather than piety itself that will occupy us this 
morning. Methodical holiness ; goodness by rule ; 
clock-work religion. We are conscious of a certain in- 
congruity in this mode of representation. We are pre- 
pared to stand by the representation, however, and 
to push it. The involved absurdity is apparent as 
soon as the case is stated baldly. We may, however, 
discover that, in this instance, as in some others, 
what looks first-off to be absurdity, may some of it 
be good sense seen foreshortened. At any rate, the 
incongruity is all in our text. David's piety worked 
itself forth in periodic displays. Three times daily, 
and at set times. " Seven times a day do I praise 
Thee," says the unknown writer of the 119th Psalm; 
only a fanciful "accommodation, that may be, to the 
numerical symbol of Judaism. Three times daily and 
at set times. 

4 (73) 



74 METHODICAL PIETY. 

Our verse then exhibits in sober" earnest the me- 
chanics of religion and the arithmetic of it. The 
mathematical idea really lies more or less apparent in 
almost everything great and good. An algebraic 
formula has been written, containing but six symbols, 
that embraces within itself the whole completed his- 
tory of the material universe with all its forces and 
phenomena. In the 21st of Revelation the heavenly 
Jerusalem is laid along the lines of a geometric solid. 
St. John is continually falling back onto figures in 
the exposition of the Apocalypse. Holiness and 
arithmetic may not be as mutually exclusive as seems 
at first sight. And so, I say, David prayed three 
times daily and at set times. 

The entire Old Testament is full of allusions that 
are similar. Old-dispensation righteousness was in- 
laid with method. There must have been meaning 
in this, and a meaning, we might imagine, that would 
naturally survive in some measure the transition to 
the righteousness of the New Dispensation. It had 
elements of exactness and precision. This comes to 
the surface incidentally in the story of Daniel, who 
prayed three times a day, and not only that, but had 
a particular place for praying, and a particular window 
that he prayed at, and a specific point on the western 
horizon toward which his devotions aimed them- 
selves. All of which was quite mechanical and for- 
mal ; and yet we remember that Daniel was an ex- 



METHODICAL PIETY. 75 

ceedingly safe man in an emergency. The move- 
ments in the astronomic heavens are all of them 
along lines of mathematical precision, which at the 
first look may appear to rob the firmament and the 
dances of the stars of something of their poetry and 
song ; and yet the fact, cold and unmelodious though 
it be, enables us to compute the right ascension and 
declination of those stars for any given moment of 
the day, year, or century, which is something. Daniel 
was more methodical than may be poetic ; but it is 
something to be able to forecast a man's latitude 
and longitude as Daniel's could be. The clock-work 
element in his religion was quite conspicuous, and 
yet it is worth a good deal to have a man in trying 
times that will tick the minutes as distinctly as he, 
and strike with so full a ring when the hour comes 
around. It is good to have men in community that 
run so close with the sun, that when it is foggy you 
can tell what time it is by looking in their faces. I 
should say, then, that the Daniels and Davids help 
reconcile us in a degree to the idea of goodness and 
devotion that is devout and good by rule. 

Whatever, then, may be our natural disposition 
toward methodical piety and systematic religion, it 
will be worth our while to look at the matter with 
some care and see what we can make of it. It lacks 
that fine quality of spontaneity that is so dear and 
precious, and so excites in us some opposition and 



7 6 METHODICAL PIETY. 

distrust, and still may be a thing that can not lightly 
be dispensed with. It is ceremonious, yet there are 
things that are worse than ceremony. Ceremony is 
something like the bones in the body, which need to 
be neatly covered with tissue, and yet serve an admi- 
rable purpose in maintaining the proportions of the 
body and securing its stability. Even a form of ser- 
vice as free and simple as our own, is, after all, ex- 
ceedingly ceremonious and arithmetic. For example: 
Every Sunday morning, almost precisely as the sun is 
crossing a given meridian, we commence what is 
called the " long prayer." We sit or stand in the 
same place, assume the same posture, pray for about 
the same things in very nearly the same words, and 
when the sun has traversed three degrees, say "Amen," 
and take up the next part of the service. We may 
not be in the mood of prayer always when we begin, 
and it may be at times with a sense of relief that the 
end is reached ; still we follow the method with 
reverent particularity, and consider the arrangement 
a wholesome one. There is with us all a sense of 
time-piece and sun-dial in our public worship. The 
clock is hung directly in front of the pulpit, in order 
that the processes of the minister may not fall out of 
beat with the swing of the pendulum. The whole 
service is stretched upon a framework of ceremony, 
and hung upon bars arithmetically distanced, and that 
really is what saves our service. 






METHODICAL PIETY. 



77 



Worship at its best is spontaneous and untimed, so 
that all this mechanical and numerical element must 
jar a little upon all true conception of the matter. 
" God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must 
worship Him in spirit "; and in using that language 
our Lord was speaking very close upon the matter we 
have in hand. Quite coincident with those words of 
His is the sentiment of our hymn : " Prayer is the 
Christian's native air "; and yet we sing that hymn 
and others like it at our stated meetings of social de- 
votion, meetings so contrived as to have the first 
word of invocation spoken just as the hour-hand is at 
the top of the dial-plate, and the last word of bene- 
diction exactly as the hand returns to the same point. 
That is, we plan to be devout just sixty minutes, and 
the method is a most admirable one. It is not an 
ideal method, but, what is a good deal more to the 
purpose, it is as good a method as we are equal to. 
In any matter the best way to become equal to better 
methods is to be very loyal in our use of present ones 
that are not as good. Paul outgrew Judaism, because 
he had been so good a Jew. The best way to become 
bigger is to be as big as we are, with all our might. 
The best way to learn how to do a great thing is to 
acquire dexterity in doing small ones. The quickest 
means of reaching perfection in any line is the culti- 
vation of our powers in the assiduous practice of what 
is a little short of perfection. The boy who will 



78 METHODICAL PIETY. 

spring high Into the air takes care to select a solid bit 
of ground upon which to base and steady his spring. 
Praying by the clock is not ideal, neither are we, and 
trying to adopt ideal methods into situations that are 
not themselves ideal, not only gives us no perfection 
in the result, but only a very ordinary sort of imper- 
fection. 

Too much ideal may be the worst hindrance to our 
reaching the ideal, just as too much sun not only pre- 
vents our seeing the sun, but blinds us so that we 
can not see anything else. We try to do the works of 
genius, and in the very way that genius does them, 
before we have reached the estate of genius. It does 
not appear that Christ was subject to particular days, 
places, or rules. Godliness with Him was spontaneous. 
Holiness in being and in act was in Him a genius. 
Now, our foolish ambition is to do as Christ did, with- 
out first having become what Christ was. We judge 
ourselves by extreme standards. We are forbidden 
to judge others. Paul says: "I judge not myself." 
" In your patience possess ye your souls," has its 
bearing upon the way we feel toward our own imper- 
fect ways of being and doing, as well as toward the 
faultiness of others. 

It is our ambition to have goodness so become a 
second nature with us that we can do right, and be 
devout and gentle and sweet and forgiving, without 
taking any pains to be, and without laying down any 



METHODICAL PIETY. ? g 

rules for ourselves in the matter. Anything else than 
that is artificial goodness and machine holiness. How 
devout and humble and honest and forbearing we 
would be if we could be so without its tiring us. A 
child with a little peevishness in her disposition com- 
mences the day with a resolution not to speak an 
unkind word. The effort wearies her, and before 
noon she drops back into the old current. She hears 
the bird singing in the cage, and thinks how delight- 
ful it would be if only pleasant words fell from her as 
easily as pleasant notes fall from the bird. The 
problem of improvement is to become a perfect thing 
by patient continuance in doing what is not perfect. 
The only way a child learns to walk perfectly is to 
persist contentedly in walking awkwardly and tum- 
blingly. It is full of effort and bumps ; but that is 
the coin in which all the staples of this life and of the 
other have to be paid for. 

A talent for goodness has to be acquired as much 
as a talent for trade or sculpture, and is reached in 
either case over a rough road of rules and prescrip- 
tions. We have to learn to be good as well as to be 
artists in other lines. Goodness is certainly an art ; 
and art-power here, as elsewhere, is preceded by no 
end of drudgery. We are all born at the foot of the 
hill. Whether we are born sinners or not is matter 
for the schools, but that we are not born saints you 
and I know as well as the theologians. Making up 



80 METHODICAL PIETY. 

our minds to be good no more makes us good than 
making up our minds to be scholars makes us scholars. 
We have to work out our salvation. We have to 
learn to do well. And there must be constant resort 
to the artificial and the mechanical till the lesson is 
learned, doing by rule what we have not yet the 
heart to do by impulse. We become better than we 
are by doing better than it is in our heart to do, 
better than it is yet our new nature to do, and so 
observing rules of behavior. The Law is a school- 
master to bring us to Christ. Everything at the out- 
set has to be done by rule. We talk by rule, we walk 
by rule, we read by rule, we sing and play by rule. 
The quickest way to outgrow rule is to make faithful 
use of rule. The melted iron can dispense with the 
mould by having been run in the mould. The more 
pains we take to make the letters in our copy-book like 
those at the top of the page, the sooner we can get 
along without any copy-book. The element of the 
formal and the mechanical is the threshold over 
which we step forward to any new acquisition. 

God's discipline of the world began, therefore, with 
the announcement of statutes. The first thing God 
gave Adam was a rule ; and the first thing Adam did 
was to break it, which shows that even the first man 
had no native talent for being good and doing right ; 
men have to be trained to it, established in it by dis- 
cipline. The Old Testament is loaded with statutes, 



METHODICAL PIETY. 8 1 

and as soon almost as we turn the fly-leaves we find 
Christ reaffirming those statutes. There is never so 
much or such sort of wind in the sails as to make it 
safe to dispense with the rudder. I should not be 
surprised to know that a perfect man needs no com- 
pass apart from the holy impulses that are in him. 
But not we. Men are enjoined to do better than it 
is their nature to do. We become better only as we 
do better than we are. We outgrow rules by obeying 
them. Our life can become unmechanically holy only 
by first being artificially and laboriously holy. Spon- 
taneous holiness, purely such, means Heaven, not 
earth. We are apprentices here. We have to try 
to behave better than we are in order to succeed in 
becoming as good as we behave. There is no man 
here who is not retrograding, unless his deed is better 
than his desire, and his life so far forth an affectation. 
We can not trust our intuitions, and so we are obliged 
to think by rule, that is, be logical. We can not trust 
our impulses, and therefore we have to behave by rule. 
But it is for our encouragement to bethink ourselves 
of this, which we must all to a degree have experi- 
enced, that even an outward rule observed with 
patient fidelity begins to become in time an inward 
bent. What we admire as spontaneity is very often 
only the flower that has, with imperceptible steps, 
unfolded from the coarse calyx of painful effort ; just 
as we know that with the piano-pupil, what begins as 
4* 



82 METHODICAL PIETY. 

a painful and laborious touching of individual notes, 
without any break, culminates in the end in an artistic 
rendering full of delightful and unconscious facility ; 
and just as probably what we dignify as intellectual 
intuition, is only reasoning that knows how to be 
expeditious, logic on the wing. 

And now more than anything for the sake of sam- 
pling the applications of which our principle admits, 
we shall mention three or four matters of religious 
observance and the like, which it is not safe to leave 
unregulated. First, prayer. This is the matter which 
is particularized in our text. Several references have 
already been made to it in our effort to make clear 
the matter of method and the need of rule. Prayer 
at fixed times is awkward. If our devotions were 
like the bird's note, that warbles itself forth in de- 
licious unconstraint ; if we were like the flower that 
exhales perfume because it is a part of its nature, 
regulation could be dispensed with. But not only is 
it awkward to pray at fixed times ; a little neglect 
would easily make it awkward for us to pray at any 
time. When necessity has detained us from our 
closet for one day, indisposition will easily detain us 
the next. At whatever height the bird may be sail- 
ing, it begins to near the earth as soon as its wings 
stop. It is therefore we need a prayer-law for our- 
selves, closet-regulations. Our impulses can not be 
relied upon. If we never prayed except when we 



METHODICAL PIETY. 83 

felt like it, we should soon cease ever to feel like it. 
A rule of prayer is a staff set up for a weak and in- 
constant impulse to lean against and be bound to. 
The branches of a tree need to be trimmed and its 
trunk kept erect, as well as its roots watered. The 
ideal of prayer is to pray without ceasing, to have a 
life as pleasantly in fellowship with heavenly influ- 
ences as is the earth constant in its sense of the solar 
drawings upon it. But such an ideal is always still 
far forward of us. There are not many men here that 
can for six hours work with all their might in their 
office and not drop a little from the mood of prayer. 
Our secular and our religious life do not pull evenly 
together. We resolve in the morning that we will 
save a moment for heavenly conference here and there 
through the day, and the next time we think of it is 
to-morrow morning when we resolve the same thing 
over again. It is not safe to leave the matter to the 
disposal of a planless sentiment. When we have prayed 
a deliberate, and if you please, formal prayer in the 
morning, we shall be far more likely to have a thought 
slipping Godwards from time to time in the push and 
distraction of business, than if the day begins without 
some such formal devotement of ourselves before 
Him. It is easy to ridicule the formality of it, but 
the chances all are, that you will have nothing better 
than that without that. There is peril in cutting 
loose from the habitual and the stated. Disposition 



84 METHODICAL PIETY. 

needs training. Character is impulse that has been 
reined down into steady continuance. Set times for 
meeting God help develop in us set times for wanting 
to meet Him. 

Second — Sanctuary Worship. — We are creatures of 
time and place, and till we become completely sanc- 
tified like the angels, we shall depend upon days and 
houses of worship. " The hour cometh when ye shall 
neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship 
the Father." In heaven we are told by John there 
is to be no temple. By that time it is to be supposed 
we shall have outgrown the need of it ; but not yet. 
In our present estate place is an essential of worship. 
We lean upon the idea of place and are stayed by it. 
I have no hesitancy in saying that the men who are 
becoming most rapidly fitted to worship God in the 
untempled city, are those who stand most constantly 
in the temple courts of the cities that are terrestrial. 
Something besides pretty fancies about worshipping 
God in the tabernacle of nature — something besides 
that is what puts iron into the blood of men and 
women that are devoting life to the conversion of 
men and the saving of the world. The man who sees 
most of God in nature and comes closest to Him 
among the mountains and out under the stars will be 
he who has first felt the strange presence of His 
Spirit at the altar. ^Esthetic exhilaration must not 
be confounded with devout communion. Nowhere is 



METHODICAL PIETY. 85 

the presence and glory of God in earth, sea, and 
heavens so sublimely celebrated as in the Psalms ; 
and nowhere else are more fervid eulogies pronounced 
upon the sanctuary of God and the courts of the 
Lord's house. 

And the matter may judiciously be pressed still 
one step farther. As at present disposed we need 
not only a sanctuary to worship in, but one is a 
great deal better than two or any number greater. 
About as well have half a dozen domestic homes as 
half a dozen religious homes, sanctuary homes. There 
is in every such city as this a vast number of church- 
goers that are in a distinguished sense pilgrims upon 
the earth. There are laws that can not be trans- 
gressed with impunity. The benefits accruing from 
the services of the sanctuary depend very much upon 
the fixity of the sanctuary. There is a wide differ- 
ence between sitting under God's truth and going 
around sampling the preaching. One is using the 
church as we should use a theatre or concert-hall ; the 
other as we should use our dining-table, spread with 
favors for the nourishment of the body. One is busi- 
ness, the other is amusement. This is no reflection 
upon people who sample the churches for the purpose 
of finding one that can be to them a true church 
home, and then settle in it and become a fixture; al- 
though even such experimenting can easily be pro- 
longed to a man's detriment and engender restless 



86 METHODICAL PIETY. 

instability even where it did not exist before, as men 
who go upon the road in search of work and a home, 
readily degenerate into tramps, with the loss of all 
sense of home, and anxious for nothing so much as 
to evade work and draw gratuitous sustenance from a 
long-suffering public. Nomadic hearers dissipate what 
religion they have, faster than they accumulate it. 
Trees that are pulled up and set out in new soil each 
week make lean fruit-bearers. Peripatetic worship- 
pers that are established in their instability neither 
help us by their presence nor gain from us by our 
presence. 

There are other points in regard to which I wanted 
to say a word, but will only speak in addition of church- 
membership. A Christian says to me : I do not care 
to identify myself with any particular church, for I 
am a member of the Church of Christ, and that tran- 
scends all local churches and all denominations of 
churches. There is a great truth in this if only we 
will use it truthfully. Sometime, most likely, there 
will be nothing just like our churches or like our de- 
nominations. So much organization as we have at 
present is an accommodation to our weakness. We 
outgrow law by being true to law. We outgrow or- 
ganization by being true to organization. It is a 
great deal easier to be all bound up in a local church 
than to be all bound up in the Church universal. It 
is not so sublime, but it is easier, and is as much as 






METHODICAL PIETY. 87 



we are equal to, most of us. Denominationalism is 
certainly not the ideal, but I am thoroughly per- 
suaded that the best way to outgrow denomination- 
alism is to be grandly and generously true to the 
denomination we are in, and it makes not much dif- 
ference which that is. There is not nearly the diffi- 
culty in sympathizing with a concrete fact that there 
is in sympathizing with an abstract idea. What we 
gain in breadth we are likely to lose in intensity. 
Sheer liberality of idea, and pure unprecision of loy- 
alty, is not doing the world's converting work. The 
rays of light that stream in at your bedroom window 
affect you far more deeply and do a great deal more 
for you, than a whole heavenful of light lying out- 
side, that you can only form ideas and conjectures 
about. If we are cold we go and warm ourselves at 
the particular register that opens into our room. 
When the Hebrews set about rebuilding the walls of 
Jerusalem, each man was instructed to build over 
against his own house. That was better economy 
than for each man to do a little everywhere, and by 
that means not do much of anything anywhere. 
The results are a good deal of the latter sort when 
a man stops with being simply a member of the 
Church universal ; he neither denotes much to the 
church nor the church much to him. We get affected 
by close contacts with live things at specific points. 
If our arms were long enough we might reach around 



88 METHODICAL PIETY. 

the world and put our stamp everywhere. But it is 
silly for us to spend in contemplating the ideal gran- 
deur of such an embrace the time we might turn to 
account in putting practical pressure upon the little 
spot where we stand. It is a great thing to love all 
mankind. There is nothing like it. But it is better 
to say a single word of cheer and comfort to the man 
who stands next you, than merely to love the whole 
race with a thin dilute of affection that -never reaches 
the point of doing anything for anybody. The best 
way really to know how to love the man that is 
farthest from you, is to begin by loving and blessing 
the man that is next you. It is a small matter, I con- 
fess, to love your neighbor, but the slumbering poten- 
cies of universal love are all in it. So I confess it is 
a very narrow thing to belong to a single church 
and love it with all our heart, and pray for it and 
work for it seven days in a week ; but for all that, it 
is the only means I know of getting into such vital 
connection with the Church universal as shall really 
make that church anything more than an idea, or my 
relation to it anything better than a theory. We may 
well withhold our confidence from any breadth or 
liberalism that does not first begin in narrowness and 
outgrow the narrowness by being as immense as it 
can inside of its limitations, and so bursting those 
limitations. That will give us breadth that will be 
something other than a pet name for thinness, and 






METHODICAL PIETY. 89 

liberalism that will be something better than a eu- 
phemism for indifference. 

Such are some of the applications of which our prin- 
ciple admits. I had intended to speak of creeds and 
beneficence in the same connection, but our time is 
expired. And the general thought with which I want 
to conclude is, that we should be satisfied to creep be- 
fore we can walk, and satisfied to walk before we can 
fly ; that we should recognize that we are apprentices ; 
that life is a fitting school ; not be discouraged by 
our infirmities nor by the inconstancy of our impulses, 
but thank the wise Providence who has given to us 
laws for those inconstant impulses to stay them- 
selves upon, till they shall have risen into strength 
and been disciplined into stability. And may we be 
disposed especially to take the laws of this Holy 
Book, and the heavenly statutes as they stand re- 
vealed in the incarnated life of the Son of God, and 
use those laws of giving, loving, praying, helping, for- 
giving, constrain our behavior to them, lash our im- 
pulses to them in patient endurance and obedience, 
strengthening our hearts forever with the hope of the 
good time coming, when at length prayer shall have 
become a joy, service a delight, and all God's chil- 
dren full of genius for doing the things that are pure, 
gentle, and true ; when they shall all mount up with 
wings as eagles, run and not be weary, walk and 
not faint. 



VII. 

PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

"Now when Daniel knew that the writing was 
signed, he went into his house ; and, his win- 
dow being opened in his chamber toward 
Jerusalem, he kiteeled upon his knees three 
times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks be- 
fore his God, as he did aforetime" — Daniel 
vi. 10. 

The incident then yields us a glimpse of the ordi- 
nary tone and temper of Daniel's mind : — " as he did 
aforetime." The devoutness remarked in the verse 
the writer takes care to imply was not a paroxysm of 
godliness excited by present exigency, nor an assump- 
tion of godliness induced by present intimidation : — 
" as he did aforetime." Daniel was then what we 
should call a spiritually-minded believer ; — if the term 
does not grate a little harshly — a pious believer. 

Piety gets reckoned sometimes as a supernumerary 

grace, as though, without it, religion could reach as 

fine a point as is needful, practical, or practicable. 

Judging from this, and other passages of the book, 

Daniel's faith was essentially a devout, a pious faith. 
M 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 91 

Piety perhaps can not be stated so exactly, but its 
general scope it is not hard to appreciate. It is a 
subjective matter. It relates less to what a man is 
seen to do outwardly, than to relations that he is 
supposed to sustain inwardly. Daniel's piety be- 
trayed itself by his thrice daily devotions, and other- 
wise. He was not pious because he prayed ; he 
prayed because he was pious. He was a praying 
man : he lived close to God ; maintained personal 
intercourse with Him. Like Enoch he walked with 
God, whatever in particular that may be construed to 
mean. Religion we all believe in, but piety, possibly, 
is something that is not to us quite as generally con- 
genial, even to those that count themselves believers. 
The word at any rate expresses something, or at least 
suggests something, with which there is considerably 
less than unanimous sympathy. Daniel's piety con- 
sisted not so much in his belief in God, as in his con- 
stant intimacy with Him. He was a man whose in- 
tegrity was beyond question, — so the earlier verses of 
the chapter intimate ; but quite beside this, God stood 
near to him and was a very real and personal thing to 
him. He confided in God : he talked over with God 
his wants and distresses. He did not say his prayers. 
Prayer meant with him coming within speaking dis- 
tance of God and getting into social relation with 
Him. He told God the secrets of his heart, and in 
consequence God told him His. When we let God 



92 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

into our confidence He lets us into His. And so 
all the way through the last half of this book we 
have nothing but a record of the way in which God 
made Daniel His confidant. The last six chapters of 
it are only a series of the secrets that God told Daniel, 
— revelations, visions, we call them, — but that is only 
another name for secrets, and means that now and 
then God makes a man His confidant, and trusts His 
secrets to the man, because the man first trusted his 
to Him. That Daniel therefore should have been a 
prophet is only an additional showing of what our 
text implies, that he was a devout, a pious believer. 
Piety denotes the holy affection with which we draw 
nigh to God, and in response to which He draws 
nigh to us. It is the Latin word " Pietas," which de- 
notes the reverent regard with which in any instance 
the inferior approaches his superior, as when Cicero 
says, " Pius in parentes," — " devoutly loyal to one's 
father and mother." And all this is so perfectly ful- 
filled in Daniel that we say of him that his was a de- 
vout, a plus faith in God. 

And yet as already intimated, piety is not infre- 
quently discounted in the esteem of the world and 
even in that of Christians. The word, or some of its 
associations, works a certain repulsion. It is not of 
frequent occurrence in modern discourse. I hear good 
men employing it lightly and slightingly. Either the 
word has lost caste or the thing it stands for has lost 
caste. It may be some of both. 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 93 

In some cases this disesteem proceeds from its sup- 
posed inutility. Piety is not thought of as being re- 
lated to life in such a way as to be at all the ground- 
work of life or a practical efficiency in life. Life and 
piety, character and piety, are conceived of as having 
neither of them much of anything to do with the 
other. Character is rated as a utility, and piety only 
as a luxury, which it is well enough to indulge in if 
one has the taste, and if there are no more sturdy 
and practical concerns to which his attention needs to 
be directed. The matter is surveyed from a utilitarian 
stand-point. That is the temper of our generation. 
Men and things are rated by their capacity to yield 
certain effects that can be stated and registered. If a 
business man sends his boy to school, the chances are 
that he will want him instructed only in such branches 
as will bear with evident directness on the boy's ulti- 
mate business success. The utilities and the humani- 
ties are sharply discriminated. And so in the matter 
in hand, piety gets denied a place among the utilities. 
It is not conceded that it tells with certainty and 
directness on a man's success as a man. Piety is 
treated as a kind of annex to character, neither char- 
acter supporting piety, nor piety character, but the 
two lying off on distinct foundations with no inter- 
communication between them except such as is acci- 
dental and non-essential. That is one secret of the 
disfavor that piety is regarded with, it is counted as 
one of the dispensables, a sort of moral extravagance. 



94 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

Another ground of this disfavor is that piety is so 
easily shammed. Integrity is more a matter between 
man and man, so that its counterfeit is more likely to 
be detected. Piety is a matter between man and 
God, and so can be assumed with considerable ease 
and safety. "A man may pray and pray and pray 
and be a villain. " Scripture, even, encourages laying 
more stress on the proofs of integrity than on the 
symptoms of piety. " Not every one that saith to 
me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of 
heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father 
which is in heaven.'' The word " chant " had to 
part with only one letter before it became " cant," 
and " piety" adds but two to become u pietism." 
And even without any change in spelling we have to 
notice how the word "piety" is spoken to know 
whether the speaker means by it holiness or hypoc- 
risy. Perhaps the readiness with which we suspect 
professed piety is a subtle evidence of the respect 
with which we regard genuine piety, just as it is the 
gold crown and not the nickel penny that we look at 
twice before taking. As has been said, " Hypocrisy is 
the homage that vice pays to virtue." Still the prev- 
alence of the counterfeit does work distrust ; and if all 
who profess to be the intimates of God were so, some, 
who are not so, would find one obstacle removed to 
their becoming so. 

But the greatest hindrance to piety, among the 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 95 

class that I am addressing particularly, is not that it 
is so easily counterfeited, nor the supposition that it 
is unpractical, but a half-formed suspicion that piety, 
all things taken into the account, is not exactly prac- 
ticable. And I have selected this topic for the 
reason that I imagine, and indeed am quite sure, that 
there are those among us who consider themselves 
Christians, but who feel in their own Christianity the 
absence of just this deep, earnest element of devout- 
ness and holy closeness to God, but who have the 
feeling that a warm spiritual life and a hearty secular 
life are somehow not quite compatible ; so that if a 
man is in trade, for example, he will either have to 
give up piety and make a business of trafficking, or 
else give up trafficking and make a business of piety. 
And with this class of people we can certainly 
afford to feel a good deal of sympathy, and to exer- 
cise toward them a good deal of charity. Very likely 
we have not any of us got this matter so exquisitely 
adjusted that we can both pray in such a way as not 
to lose interest in our business and do business in 
such a way as not to lose interest in our prayers. I 
know of no preacher in New England of a more 
devout and spiritual cast than the one who said 
recently, " I think we all find it the hardest and most 
hopeless work of all our lives, the effort to keep our 
highest ideas and our commonest occupations in con- 
stant and healthy contact with each other/' Almost 



96 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

every prayer we utter or hear uttered contains evi- 
dences that our secular interests and our spiritual 
ones have not come yet into any arrangement that is 
perfectly amicable. We can abandon our religion 
and find no difficulty in observing the apostle's ad- 
monition, not to be slothful in business ; or we can 
go out of business, and so gain a new facility in fol- 
lowing his other direction, to be fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord. The problem is to observe the 
two simultaneously, and so to stand in both relations 
that we shall feel that in neither are we obstructing 
hearty and successful engagement in the other. Of 
course, all such adjustment each has to make for him- 
self, and the most that I can do will be to state and 
illustrate two or three principles, in the recognition 
of which all successful efforts at adjustment will have 
to proceed. 

And the first of these is that a Christian, to be 
such in anything like its New Testament sense, has 
left him no choice to stop short of anything less than 
spiritual-mindedness. Devoutness, prayerfulness, en- 
trance into God's intimacy, or call it by whatever 
other name you will, is not a thing that Gospel Chris- 
tianity can don and doff at its option. Christianity 
is not believing that there is a God, but it is believ- 
ing God ; and so, fresh from the start, it is a matter 
purely personal between Him and us. The Christian 
religion, so soon as it is regarded intently, does not 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. gy 

taper off into piety, but pyramids up from piety. 
Piety is not the fruit, but the kernel. We begin to be 
Christians by drawing near to God. It is no more 
than philosophy to conjecture that there is a God. 
Atheism is not so far below such a conjecture as per- 
sonal communion with God is above it. Religion 
commences with the commencement of direct per- 
sonal relations with God, and continues so long as 
those personal relations continue. Prayer and com- 
munion are as much a part of religion as converse and 
communion are a part of friendship. Christianity is 
substantially friendship with God in Christ. Our 
very love to God will needs draw all sorts of hearty 
address to Him and spiritual fellowship with Him in 
its wake. And Scripture is loaded with multiplied 
affirmations and diversified implications of this. Its 
pages are saturated with the spirit of devoutness. 
Prayer and communion, all that combine to compose 
spirituality of life, are involved by statement or by 
inference in almost every chapter. There is not ad- 
dressed to us in Scripture a plainer command than 
the command to pray and to have a spirit animated 
with the instinct of prayer — " Pray without ceasing"; 
" Draw nigh to God "; " Watch and pray "; " Ye shall 
seek Me and find Me when ye seek Me with all your 
heart "; " Continue in prayer." If we are trying, 
any of us, to be Christians, without being spiritually- 
minded Christians, we are attempting to compose 
5 



98 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

the music of our religious life in a key nowhere set 
for us in the Holy Word. 

And such piety is no matter of unpractical extrava- 
gance. It is no bare annex. If there are better and 
clearer hopes of the future than there were two thou- 
sand and three thousand years ago, it is because men 
have drawn near to God, and in Him have passed al- 
ready under the power of an endless life, and Christ 
himself become in them the hope of glory. And if a 
better morality prevails now than before Calvary and 
Pentecost, it is still because men have drawn closer tp 
God, have put themselves under the power of His 
Spirit, and let that Spirit ripen out in them into all 
that luscious fruitage of virtues particularized in the 
fifth of Galatians. 

And our exigency is not met by listening, on occa- 
sion, to the devout supplicatings and spoken com- 
munings of any who may happen to be standing in 
fellowship with God. His spiritual-mindedness is 
valid for him, not for others. Devoutness is not 
transferable. The officers of a church can not be 
devout for the rest of the church. The father of a 
household can not be pious for the family. If I am 
to be rained upon, / must stand out under the cloud. 
The buds will not start in my orchard at the im- 
pulse of the south wind that blows across my neigh- 
bor's orchard. There is no proxy in Scripture. Vi- 
cars are a thing of the past. Priests are obsolete. 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 99 

The Gospel appeals to the individual. That, then, is 
our first principle. We may find it difficult to arbi- 
trate the claims of religion and business, but the first 
thing about the matter for us to consider as definitive- 
ly established is that there is no hint in the New 
Testament of a religion that does not pray deeply, 
earnestly, strongly, fervidly, — that does not come 
near to God and walk with Him, and find delightful 
companionship with Him and win from Him daily 
strength and stimulus. 

And the second general principle to be stated is, 
that whatever our secular vocation may be, provided 
always it be a proper one, that, too, we are to thrust 
ourselves into with just the same intensity of energy 
and heartiness of resolve. We shall never make a 
success of life, and compose its contradictions by en- 
tering into its business pursuits with half-heartedness. 
We are not going to make secular work holy by do- 
ing it in a languid and slipshod way. There is no 
more godliness in doing a secular thing listlessly and 
indifferently, than in doing it with the best energies 
that are in us, and not so much. " Whatsoever ye do, 
do it heartily." And that injunction the apostle ad- 
dresses not to preachers, evangelists, distinctively 
Christian workers of any kind, but to the slaves at 
Colosse, who had nothing else to do but the seculai 
drudgery at which their masters set them. " Whatso- 
ever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." 



IOO PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

It is in us, whatever vocation we have chosen, to en- 
list in it all our powers. We run against ineradicable 
instincts when we do otherwise. 

To a young man I would say, if you are aiming 
to be a preacher, study to be the best preacher you 
know how. If you are looking to law, medicine, 
trade, mechanics, put every energy of mind under 
contribution to your purpose. There is nothing un- 
holy in succeeding in any noble enterprise we may 
undertake, and to do that, our best thoughts, affec- 
tions, powers, must be harnessed to the work. This 
is a busy world, and it was intended to be. u In 
the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread "; and 
perspiration has been the law of life for six thousand 
years. We may decry filthly lucre Sunday, but shall 
have to earn some of it Monday. Work, hard, sharp, 
and interested, is one of the facts that can not be 
weakened or displaced : and there is nothing else 
worth saving, religion and piety even, that will not 
admit of being established with this in relations of 
fair adjustment. " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to 
do, do it with thy might." 

Of course there is an extreme to which this might 
be pushed that would work mischief. Our only point 
here is to meet the difficulty felt by so many, who 
dare not quite shake out the reins over their inter- 
ested energies in any secular employment, lest some- 
how they should come thoroughly to enjoy it, and so 






PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE, ioi 

be unable to have so much religious experience as 
seems desirable and obligatory. It is an attempt to 
portion out their powers and interests into two par- 
cels, and lest they give more to one than consists 
with the demands of the other, dealing with neither 
very generously, and obtaining no large satisfaction or 
success from the two combined. There will be no 
adjustment that will stand, which does not allow 
of our letting our energies have as free scope in 
heavenly things as though there were no earth, and 
as free scope in secular things as though there were 
no heaven. Some of the very best secular work, 
scientific work, literary work, work mechanical, po- 
litical, and military, that has ever been done, was 
done in vast and glad expenditure of power by men 
that were Christians, and had entered deeply into 
the hidden things of God. 

Much confusion has come from assuming that 
secular life and religious life necessarily work at cross 
purposes, so that what is taken from one is added to 
the other, and Christianity a draft upon a man's re- 
sources for doing business, and business a draft upon 
his resources for being a Christian. On the contrary, 
a man's chances for holiness are bettered by his labo- 
rious intercourse with things, as certainly a man's 
chances in business are enhanced by his intimacy with 
God. Piety regularly retrogrades when it draws 
away from the business and contacts of secular life. 



102 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

Hermit religion is spindling and stalky like wheat 
grown in the shade. I was reading the other day of 
a religious exquisite who said that he could not even 
withdraw from a spiritual atmosphere long enough to 
buy a barrel of flour without feeling that he had lost 
a little grace by it. There was something needing to 
be done for him that only contact with things, and 
that of the harshest kind, could have sufficed to 
effect. Quite a different and more robust sentiment 
was expressed by Dean Stanley when he said : " Deg- 
radation, by an almost universal law overtakes relig- 
ion when it loses the vivifying and elevating spirit 
breathed into it by close contact with secular influ- 
ences." 

So that in whatever way the adjustment between 
the secular and the devotional is to be effected, it is 
to be by some way that leaves each of the two tend- 
encies in its glad and original strength, just as in the 
tuning of a piano, the two wires that are struck by 
the same hammer are not restrained from discord- 
ance by muffling either of the two, but by taking care 
to have them both brought to one pitch. So these 
two tendencies, the devotional and secular, are too 
precious in themselves and too needful to each other 
to allow either's being muffled, and yet, as all along 
said, they must somehow be reduced under one yoke 
and induced to sound the same tone. And it is at 
least an encouragement to know that just such an 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 103 

adjustment has been in instances effected. A thing 
hard to be done is made a little easier by our assurance 
that it is a possible thing, and that somebody has 
somewhere and at sometime done it. It is for this 
reason that a devotional text was selected just from this 
book of Daniel, and in particular from this sixth chap- 
ter of the book ; for in its first verses it details the 
earnest interestedness with which Daniel entered into 
the discharge of his secular responsibilities. Daniel 
was a man of affairs as well as a man of prayer, and 
chancellor of Darius* exchequer as well as a seer of 
holy visions on the banks of the Hiddekel. Success 
and fidelity in neither of the two militated against 
fidelity and success in the other. His financiering 
was doubtless better for his praying, and his praying 
for his financiering. Moses is another instance of the 
same, — as distinguished for his military genius as for 
his piety ; who both delivered a nation from tyr- 
anny, and by his devoutness so won the confidence 
of God, and entered into His intimacies as to gain 
from Him a code of divine enactment which lies at 
the basis of all our present civilization. David is a 
third example, at once king and psalmist, who had 
not only the heart to marshal an army and establish 
a kingdom, but who with the same earnestness and 
intensity walked in all devoutness with God, and 
uttered melodious prayer that has been a solace to 
the afflicted, and an inspiration to the irresolute and 
the unbelieving for twenty-five hundred years. 



104 PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 

And it need not be mentioned how often in later 
times and in our own times, the men whose lives are 
fullest of business and secular engagements are the 
ones also whose hearts are most richly charged with 
tender regard for the needy, and their spirits in near- 
est and easiest access to the throne of the divine 
grace. And so it becomes a little easier to do the 
difficult, by knowing that it is possible, and has been 
done in times both earlier and later. With such exam- 
ples confronting him no busy man of us will quite as 
easily release himself from the obligation to live day by 
• day in the near fellowship of God, by such a plea as 
that piety and business are incompatible, and that 
there is no time in this short, hurried life for both. 

Besides this, there are certain experiences familiar 
to us all that may also render us assistance here and 
give us at least a clue how this adjustment is to be 
effected. There are divers interests that lie in our 
minds, side by side, and take strong hold of our re- 
gards that yet lie there, without quarrelling or trying 
in any way to trespass upon each other or rule each 
other out. Your heart, for example, is full of your 
family ; home is a dear, warm place to you. Your 
spirit is tender when you go away, and there is a good 
deal of heart in your good-bye. You go down-town 
to your business and plunge with all your might, let 
us hope, into its engagements and competitions. Yet, 
in the lulls of the stress and conflict, thoughts of the 



PIETY AND BUSINESS COMPATIBLE. 105 

household do light down upon you ; and without in 
any manner interfering with — more likely stimulating 
a little your business devotedness, these thoughts of 
home, wife, family, children, lie in your mind as a sort 
of quiet undertone that yields unobtrusive music all 
the day long, — just as the singer half unconsciously 
carries the key-note in his thought through all the 
progressions of the melody, and as the sunshine lies 
about us all the day as a kind of unsuspected pres- 
ence, and yet as a presence which does somehow con- 
trive to give a little more color to our life, and to put 
a more genial complexion upon all that transpires in 
it. So, in very common and familiar ways, we do 
have interests lying in our minds side by side that 
engage us deeply, but that never fall into controversy 
with each other, and do not try to spend on each 
other, but are like the wires we spoke of, that vibrate 
side by side, and re-enforce each the other, and utter 
two tones that seem hardly more than one, they are 
so nicely adjusted and so deftly attuned. 

And now, friends, only a few sentences more. I 
have done all that I set out to do. I have stated as 
clearly as I can the general facts, in recognition of 
which all efforts at adjustment, to be effectual, must 
proceed. Our religion is not of the kind yet which 
it is the aim of the Gospel to set forth and exem- 
plify, unless it is one which works in us devoutness 
of heart, that sets us and our heavenly Father near 



i c6 PIETY AND B USINESS COMPA TIBLE. 

one another, and gives us peace and delight and 
strength in His fellowship. From the same Scrip- 
tures we learn also, as well as from the general in- 
stinct and rpason of men, that our secular vocation is 
a sphere in which our best energies of body and mind 
and soul are to have similar room for their freest play 
and most delighted exercise ; that we are to love and 
commune with God with the best that is in us, and 
also love and attend to our business with the best 
that is in us. I have cited instances, which com- 
mend themselves to your approval, of men who have 
succeeded in doing this, and have been keen finan- 
ciers, skilful generals, and laborious sovereigns, and 
yet in it all have walked steadily and cheerily in the 
light and comfort and presence of God. And so there 
we leave the matter. If your life does not yield one 
strong accordant tone, you will not mend the matter 
by tearing out one of the strings. The details of the 
adjustment I do not care to talk about. Perhaps it 
is as well to let the divine tuner draw to its proper ten- 
sion the string that vibrates in loving service to God, 
and then tighten or loosen the other till it pulses with 
that. But all such details are a matter with you and 
God. If you have any difficulties, you will do best 
to go into the wilderness or the mountain with them, 
where Moses went with his, or into the closet, where 
Daniel carried his. 



VIII. 

CHRISTIAN LOVE. 

" Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and 
clamor and evil speaking be put away from 
you with all malice : and be ye kind one to an- 
other, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, 
even as God for Chris fs sake hath forgiven 
you*' — Eph. iv. 31, 32. 

THERE is in these words a quiet flow, and in their 
sentiment a tender rhythm, that makes them very 
musical both to the ear and the heart. Though so 
full of difficult requirement, they appeal to us with a 
grace that is irresistible and a truth we can not gain- 
say. They set before us in all clearness and delicacy 
an ideal almost too pure to become real, yet our 
thoughts draw toward it respectfully and reverently, 
even as the flowers bend themselves toward the sun 
that is too far away for them ever to rise up to and 
touch. 

There is something a little disheartening in so per- 
fect a standard of Christian dealing, " Let all bitter- 
ness and evil-speaking be put away from you, and be 

ye kind one to another, forgiving one another, even 

(107) 



108 CHRISTIAN LOVE. 

as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you "; there 
is something a little disheartening, I say, in an ideal 
so pure and exacting ; but may the humbleness it 
induces only throw us back more utterly upon the 
strength of God, whose help alone can suffice to 
cleanse our hearts from the last traces of their un- 
tenderness, and open them in large forgiveness toward 
one another, even as God's heart, for Christ's sake, is 
opened in large forgiveness toward us. 

All the graces and tendernesses mentioned in our 
text are only so many separate blossoms clustered 
upon the single stalk of Christian love ; and I want 
to say something respecting Christian love, and the 
tenderness of sentiment, gentleness of dealing, and 
charitableness of judgment that are its easy and nec- 
essary outgrowth. 

There is no one of the Christian graces which the 
Word of God has treated so exceptionally, and under- 
scored with such marks of peculiar emphasis, as the 
grace of Christian love. It is not only commended 
and applauded, but is lifted into distinction in the 
midst of the other delicacies and dignities of the in- 
ward life, as the sheaf of Joseph stood up and the 
sheaves of his brethren stood around about it and 
made obeisance unto it. Even the apostle of faith 
has to say that of these three — faith, hope, love — 
love is the greatest. It is love, said the same apostle, 
that is the fulfilling of the law. And you remember 



CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 09 

those diviner words of which these of St. Paul are 
only the later echo. It is only upon the law of love 
that St. James sets the distinguishing crown and 
names it " royal." It is love which St. Paul in his 
letter to the Colossians calls the bond of perfectness ; 
that is, the silken cord that, bound around the other 
several graces, holds them in the unity and compact- 
ness of a completed character ; like the girdle which 
detains the flowing garments or the thread that se- 
cures the bouquet. God is love, wrote St. John, the 
apostle of love. And it is love, you will remember, 
that St. Paul specifies first in his enumeration of the 
fruits of the Spirit. " The fruits of the Spirit are love, 
joy, peace, long-suffering," etc. 

And this last reference is of account not only be- 
cause it implies the supremacy of love over the other 
graces, but because it also indicates the source of its 
supply ; love is the fruit of the Spirit. Love is not 
a plant that grows in the human heart natively. This 
is not a pleasant thing to say. But experience and 
observation bear us out in it and Scripture sets to it 
its seal. Love is not indigenous. It does not spring 
up in our hearts of its own accord. There is nothing 
in us by nature that becomes love by stress of culti- 
vation. There are no seeds scattered through the 
soul's original material that spring into love by ger- 
mination. It is not a part of our dowry. Love is 
an importation ; an exotic. The fruit of the Spirit 



1 1 o CHRISTIAN LO VE. 

is love. Of course there is in hearts that are unaided 
by grace much that resembles Christian love ; but that 
we must be careful and not confound with it. Be- 
cause if love is the fulfilment of the law, then if we 
love by nature, grace is unnecessary, and all we need 
is to love more and more, and to become more and 
more by cultivation what we already are potentially 
by birth ; which is not the intent of the divine word. 
Love is the fruit of the Spirit. " Every one that 
loveth," says St. John, " is born of God." Perhaps 
some are born of God that not only do not de- 
clare it, but have not of it, even themselves, a com- 
plete consciousness. I love to think that it is so. 
Only let it be remembered by us now and- always 
that the love which the Gospel distinguishes and 
which St. James imperializes is the love which a man 
is able to exercise by virtue of his new birth. " Every 
one that loveth is born of God." 

Considerable of what passes as love is no more 
than what St. Paul in his letter to the Romans and 
in one of his letters to Timothy calls " natural affec- 
tion." Natural affection is only a sort of forerunner 
of love ; just as when we examine the animal remains 
of the early geological periods we find very much 
that reminds of man and that we construe now to be 
a kind of unconscious prophecy of man that was 
afterward to be. In the same way natural affection 
is a kind of prototype of love. Nothing can make 



CHRISTIAN LO VE. in 

natural affection love, just, as nothing can make a fish 
a man, although containing in its structure much 
that is suggestive of man. Natural affection, I say, 
is a kind of prototype of love. It is as near love as 
a man can get without being helped by the grace of 
God. Natural affection is between men in their nat- 
ural relations just what love is between them in their 
spiritual relations. A part of what we call love is 
then only natural affection. 

Much of what passes as love, also, is self-interest 
in some one of its finer forms ; concealed self-interest ; 
very likely unconscious self-interest. It is surprising 
and disheartening to discover how many ingredients 
of self-regard lurk in our best endeavors and most 
generous deeds. A kind of unconscious barter, a good 
deal of it is ; I like you because you like me ; I do 
for you because you do for me ; I love you because 
you love me. " But if ye love them which love you, 
what reward have ye ? do not even the publicans the 
same ? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do 
ye more than others ? do not even the publicans so ? 
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
is in heaven is perfect. " And the perfection here 
meant is God's love in its self-regardlessness. In His 
love, God lets clean go of Himself. He loves men as 
such ; loves them because they are men. " God is 
love," and " he that loveth is born of God." 

The love that the Gospel celebrates, then, is that 



112 CHRISTIAN LOVE. 

in which self-regard is held neither visibly nor invis- 
ibly in solution. It -is investment without thought 
of dividend. It is putting ourselves utterly out of 
the account for another's sake. It is consciousness 
of nothing but of the one we would do for, and 
works in us all kinds of beautiful service. But when 
we look into it ingenuously we discover that we hold 
most of our love within certain lines and inside of 
particular circumferences, and that most of those lines 
are drawn in some little degree relatively to us, like 
the boy who throws his ball at such an angle that 
when it bounds back it will fall near his own hand 
again. The cloud of our beneficence we are likely to 
suspend at such a point that when it falls in rain we 
shall be found standing under some little corner of 
it, and absorb some inconspicuous moiety of the bap- 
tism. The heart is deceitful above all things and 
bears watching. You will recall, perhaps, the words 
that Shakespeare makes the king of France say to 
King Lear : 

" Love is not love 
When it is mingled with respects that stand 
Aloof from the entire point." 

All of which our Lord expressed more briefly and 
simply when He said, "Lend, hoping for nothing 
again." Investment without thought of dividend. 
That is love ; that is Gospel love ; better than faith 
and better than hope ; the first among the graces ; 






CHRISTIAN LOVE. 



113 



the fulfilment of the law. And " he that loveth is 
born of God." 

If now this fundamental fact is already accom- 
plished in us, there are others that will rest easily 
upon it and grow readily out of it. If we have 
reached the point of being able to love men, as such, 
with a Christly disinterestedness, we shall in the first 
place find it very easy to make allowances for them 
in those respects wherein in point of behavior they 
differ from us. It is in the very nature of love to 
want to make allowances. It is easy for a selfish man 
to make allowances for himself ; and love feels toward 
another just as selfishness feels toward self. Love is 
seen thus to be selfishness turned inside out. I do 
not think that men would seem as bad as they do if 
we loved them more. It is surprising how rapidly 
men begin to mend after we commence to get inter- 
ested in them. The characters that men have de- 
pend a good deal on the way in which we look at 
them. Everybody is a criminal and a sinner as soon 
as he is inspected judicially. " If thou, Lord, 
shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?" 

There is in this no attempt to break down the dis- 
tinctions between right and wrong ; but people are 
to us about what we look for them to be. Those 
that we believe in are good, and those that we do not 
believe in are bad. Love always finds some way out. 
That principle underlies redemption. A mother can 



1 14 CHRISTIAN LO VE. 

always find much that is good in her own children. 
A father believes in his own boy. Love makes allow- 
ances. And it is worth a good deal to be believed in. 
Some boys have been saved by it. " Love shall cover 
the multitude of sins." I do not know what that 
means, it has been explained so variously; but I 
have quoted it because somehow it seems to me as 
though it is in place here. The good that there is in 
a bad thing, in a bad heart, is out of sight ; love can 
see farther than can indifference or malignity ; and it 
is one of the blessed facts of the last day that He 
who loved us enough to throw Himself away for us 
will be our judge. 

Love softens our estimates of people because it 
enables us to put ourselves in their place. I can not 
judge a man without a knowledge of his principles. 
Temperament, education, and other circumstances go 
far to shape a man's principles, and it is his own prin- 
ciples and not mine or yours that he is amenable to. 
The question is not whether he does what we think 
is right, but whether he does what he thinks is right. 
Love will help me to appreciate his principles and to 
estimate the case from his own personal stand-point. 
Of two judgments, the more lenient, I suppose, is 
generally the more just. Love believeth all things, 
said St. Paul. Count Cavour said, that, as the result 
of his experience as a statesman, he believed the man 
who trusted men would make fewer mistakes than the 



CHRISTIAN LOVE. 115 

one who distrusted them. " Love believeth all 
things," and when the facts do not seem to square 
with belief, it " hopeth all things," and when hope 
fails, it " endureth all things." And in this effort to 
feel kindly and to be tender-hearted, I am sure we 
shall be helped by remembering that there is no one 
toward whom Christ does not feel tenderly. We 
suppose that the severest thing about the woes pro- 
nounced in the sixth of Luke was the tenderness 
with which they were uttered. How is it that any 
of the followers of Christ can give any place to malice 
toward any, if Christ could look up from the cross 
where He hung crucified and pray, — u Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do." 

It will also tend to foster kindliness in us, if when 
a wrong has been done us we discriminate between 
the deed and the man who did it. It is possible, by 
the grace of God, to be angered with what a man 
does without being angered at the man. A true 
father loves his child through everything. God loves 
us through everything. " Thou wast a God," said 
the Psalmist, " that forgavest them, though Thou 
tookest vengeance of their inventions." Christ com- 
mendeth His love toward us in that while we were 
yet sinners Christ died for us." This solves the diffi- 
culty of the command, " Be ye angry and sin not " : 
be angry without sinning : offended at the deed, but 
tender-hearted toward the doer. St. Augustine said : 



1 1 6 CHRISTIAN LO VE. 

" He is not angry with his brother who is only angry 
with the sin of his brother." We are none of us so 
without fault as not to need to have the best possible 
construction put on what we do. And that will not 
be accorded to us unless we accord it to others. " For 
with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged." 
And if we do not treat with the largest tender-heart- 
edness the wrongs that others do us, neither will God 
treat with forbearance the wrongs we do Him. " For- 
give us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors," 
is the proper reading of the fifth petition of our 
Lord's prayer. 

And then, only once more, if we have reached the 
point of loving men, as such, with Christly disinter- 
estedness we shall feel disposed always to say the 
best thing about them that can be said, and to leave 
the remainder unsaid. It is a singular fact, and a sad 
one, the ease with which our thoughts shape them- 
selves into adverse judgments. There is an unhappy 
fact wrought out in the history of that word " criti- 
cise." It used to mean to estimate, and now it means 
to depreciate. So readily do our opinions fall down 
into a minor key of disparagement. So of the word 
" judge." Properly it means to determine ; in popu- 
lar usage it strongly inclines at least toward condem- 
nation. " Judge not that ye be not judged"; and 
that means condemn not that ye be not condemned. 
All of this shows that the human mind leans toward 



CHRISTIAN LO VE. 1 1 ; 

detraction ; that is its bias. It is more congenial to 
the natural heart to convict than to acquit. Our first 
impulse naturally is, not to say pleasant things about 
people, but unpleasant ones. Were it contrariwise, 
then " criticise'' would have come before this to mean 
"to commend." And our criticism, now, is commen- 
datory in the case of those we love ; which shows 
that our estimates proceed quite as much from our 
hearts as from our heads, and that it is the wish that 
is parent to the thought. We find just what we set 
out to find, and see exactly what we want to see. 
And because we do not much care to see excellences 
in people, the first thing we mention about them 
regularly is their faults. 

You see there is a good deal of the original pagan- 
ism still in men naturally. A man is not made a dif- 
ferent man by living in the midst of Christianity un- 
less Christianity lives in the midst of him. Except 
as the grace of God works in us, the same is true here 
as was true in Greece 2,000 years back: that to us a 
man is a barbarian if he is not a Greek, and an enemy 
if he is not an advantage. The fault is not in men 
alone that their blemishes are so conspicuous, but in 
the jaundiced eye that puts its own bad complexion 
on all it beholds. A part of what we see is only the 
dingy shadow cast by our own spirit. The chameleon 
takes its hue from the spot it is upon. We give our 
hue to the spot we are upon. It is the inward dis- 



1 1 8 CHRISTIAN LO VE. 

comfort oftentimes that makes outward things disa- 
greeable, and some of the unpleasantness that we see 
and talk about in others is no more than our own 
unbearableness feeling itself and working to the sur- 
face. Criticism of this sort is, then, a sword that cuts 
two ways: it is both a verdict and a confession. 
Spiders do not weave their webs in a clean room, nor 
suspicions build their nests in a guileless heart. 

There is no person but will afford us some oppor- 
tunity for eulogy, if only we seek for it earnestly and 
feel after it affectionately. The story is told of a 
good old Christian woman, that she was never known 
to speak of any person a word in disparagement. 
One of her children knowing this eccentricity of hers, 
asked her, for the amusement of thething: " Mother, 
what do you think of the devil ?" " My dear," she 
answered, " I think it would be well if we would all 
be as diligent in doing our work as he is in doing his." 
There is nothing but what glistens if approached 
with a beaming eye, and there is always some admi- 
rable quality patent to the mind that is so genial and 
gentle as to desire to detect it. There is something 
in the habit of looking on the bright side of people 
as there is in looking on the bright side of things and 
events. Even the children should be made to under- 
stand that talking about the disagreeableness of peo- 
ple is an offence against good breeding and house- 
hold propriety. Our hearts can in some measure be 



CHIBSTIAN LOVE. 119 

trained to find pleasant things in people, just as our 
eye can be trained to find buttercups in the meadow 
or stars in the sky. 

There is, too, an element of power in this sweet 
habitude of mind that thinketh no evil and taketh 
up no reproach. Such people win their way every- 
where. The door is open to them everywhere and 
every heart made ready. Their shadow always falls 
behind them, and their coming is only brightness. 
There are faces that are a benediction, and it is not 
necessary to say to this congregation that such faces 
create a great, sweet, compelling light around us while 
they are with us, and leave a long, quiet twilight in 
our memories after the sun-setting. 

Which brings us easily to say in closing, " Be ye 
kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one 
another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven 
you." And more and more may there abound in us 
all by the working of the blessed Spirit, that love that 
shall make all our thoughts to be thoughts of tender- 
ness and cause our speech always to be with grace. 



IX. 
LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

" In him was life, and the life was the light of 
men!' — JOHN i. 4. 

In no department of literature in these past twen- 
ty-five years has more evident improvement been 
made than in that of life-writing. It is one thing to 
collate the events of a man's life and arrange them in 
the order of years, but a distinct matter, and one in- 
volving peculiar tact and appreciation, so to arrange 
them as to set loose before the reader the real quality 
of the man and the true genius of his life. The per- 
fection of a biography is not that it relates all that its 
subject ever did and said, but that with the smallest 
array of facts possible, it gains for us admission into 
the man's true inwardness. And the biographer's 
great embarrassment is that the real spirit and inner- 
most quality of a man slip out in so many little, 
quiet ways that are appreciable enough in the inter- 
changes of familiar intercourse, but so delicate and in- 
tangible as to slip through the meshes of verbal rep- 
resentation. We have all known persons, some sin- 
(120) 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 121 

gle gesture of whose hand, expression of countenance, 
twinkle of the eye, play of the lip, really set free more 
of the essential flavor of the man than any amount of 
biographic detail could do. For it is not the man's 
performances really that we are trying to get at, but 
something more interior — something that inspired 
those performances and worked itself out through 
them. It is not performances that compose life, but 
life rather that composes performances. 

And it is in just this more careful way that the word 
"life" gets used in our text: "In him was life, and 
the life was the light of men." So it was not what 
He said, did, or suffered that enlightened men and 
drew them under His power ; it was only the 
glimpses that through His words and works they 
got of Him. His sermons, miracles, agonies were 
only the rifts through which they looked up into 
Him, and beheld the life — wise, strong, and tender — 
that was in Him. For you know it is not the rift in 
the cloud that gives the light ; the rift is only the 
fracture through which the light breaks. And real 
greatness often and usually discloses itself most ade- 
quately and effectively in ways that hardly admit of 
being worded. It is just here that the biographer's 
difficulty lies. He is all the time struggling with the 
sense that his man is more than can be stated ; that 
he is greater than anything he definitely did or said. 
So every eulogy is necessarily a failure. That is why 



122 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE, 

the same person becomes so frequently the subject of 
several biographies. To use the phrase we employ- 
when ciphering in division, there is no biography that 
will go in a life without a remainder. If you attempt 
to describe a landscape, and are anything of a word- 
painter, you will do it with measurable success. But, 
with the greatest facility in the art possible, there will 
be a residue that will elude your best attempts at de- 
scription, and it is just the best thing always that will 
slip out and get left. 

If the life-power and the life-meaning were lodged 
in words definitely spoken and in deeds definitely 
done, then a man's biography were best composed of 
the stenographic report of his speeches and the linear 
gauge of his performance. But life is an inward mat- 
ter : — n him was life "; and the influence emanating 
from life and working in power upon others, is more 
apt to be like the water which lies in the grass of a 
summer morning, of which more will dissipate itself 
in silent evaporation than will trickle down the hill- 
side and sing itself away audibly toward the sea. 

There is no life that has been so numerously writ- 
ten as the life of Jesus Christ. Four inspired biogra- 
phers have tried their hand at it ; no two of their bi- 
ographies alike, and no one of them in the broadest 
sense a success. It is a most remarkable comment 
upon Christ that men have never got over writing 
commentaries upon Him. It is a long matter that 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 



123 



never gets spoken to the end when there are so many 
that are trying to speak. And the difficulty here is 
in part like that of biography generally. It was not 
the wisdom of Christ's words, nor the splendor of His 
works that filled those three years and a half with 
great events : it was He, the life that was in Him: 
and with all that was stimulating in His discourses, 
startling in His works of wonder, and harrowing in 
His sufferings, the life that was in Him would be 
quite as likely to issue in effects that would be heal- 
ing, when its creeping forth was a quiet and stealthy 
one — just as it is the light, not the lightning, that best 
fills the earth with radiance ; not the hurricane, but 
the gentle breath out of the south that stirs air and 
sea and standing corn into most healthful play ; and 
not the deluge, but the rain that drops upon the fur- 
rows with most of fertility. 

And when we fully feel that the life that was the 
light of men was something that was in Him, and 
something too that was quite likely to do its best work 
silently and in a manner to defy record, I think we 
shall be able to understand some things about Christ 
and His kingdom in the world that are otherwise a 
little difficult, and to draw some inferences that will 
be of value to us in a way quite practical. 

It explains the difficulty we have just noticed in 
composing any history of those three years that shall 
be in any manner adequate. It explains how Christ 



124 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 



could have founded His kingdom and yet drawn to 
Him so little of the world's notice while founding it. 
His working was a silent and stealthy working. He 
did not ground His kingdom in event, but in and 
upon Himself. I think we must often have felt in 
reading the Gospels, how much there must have 
been in Christ and in His moulding, and renewing, 
and upbuilding influence exercised upon His dis- 
ciples that has never come to any expression in the 
Gospels, and never could have come to verbal ex- 
pression anywhere : quite as we never could find it 
written in any treatise upon plants all the quiet but 
potent influences that braid themselves in together 
so skilfully, but so unpretentiously, to foster the life 
that lies back in the germ and unfold it into grace 
and years and stature. 

It has been used as an argument against the Christ 
of the Gospels, that the nations knew nothing about 
Him. It looks more as though the argument leaned 
the other way. Here is the kingdom of heaven es- 
tablished, and as we generally interpret facts, the very 
quietude and noiselessness of its founder is only the 
proof of a more superlative power. Romulus founded 
Rome ; Rome was a great empire and the world knew 
something about Romulus. Cyrus founded the Per- 
sian Empire, and records that were contemporary have 
taken some notice of Cyrus. Alexander established 
the Grseco-Macedonian Empire, and there is in the 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 125 

profane annals of the period abundant mention of the 
son of Philip ; but nobody outside of the little dot of 
land called Palestine knew anything about what 
Christ so-called was doing. But then here is the 
kingdom established, and it has got to be explained, 
stronger than that of Romulus, more intense than 
that of the Macedonian, and broader than that of 
Cyrus. Certainly there are no events known to us 
that are staunch enough to support it. But here is 
the kingdom established ; Christ's kingdom so-called. 
Something must underlie it. A castle that has stood 
two thousand years is itself proof positive of founda- 
tion, and if the foundation was laid noiselessly like 
Solomon's temple, in which was heard neither ham- 
mer, axe, nor any tool of iron, so much greater the 
splendor of its founding ; for however laid, two 
thousand years of history put their pressure upon 
the foundation-stone ; and the citizens of the king- 
dom, even their enemies being judges, never had 
greater occasion to rejoice and glory in its stupen- 
dous solidity. Clearly the argument leans the other 
way. Alexander laid the foundation of his empire in 
strokes that rung across the continent from the Pillars 
of Hercules to the Indus. But Alexander would 
have had to be much more than Alexander to have 
planted his empire in the gentleness and noiselessness 
with which the Judaean founded his kingdom on the 
banks of the Jordan. The argument leans the other 



126 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

way, and the very quietude with which the empire of 
the Lord was inaugurated only shows that it was not 
upon event, but upon a person and upon a life that it 
was built ; and upon what life shall the centuries, the 
continents, the nations, and the islands of Christianity 
sustain their pressure if not upon the life of the Son 
of God? 

And then there is another fact explained by a cer- 
tain quiet and necessarily unexplained influence that 
was incessantly emanating from Christ and that told 
upon men more than any startling works of His could 
have done, and that is the way in which the people 
about Him and particularly His enemies seemed many 
of them to be affected toward Him. There is a hint 
of it in the way in which the multitudes received the 
sermon on the mount. They are not reported as 
having been much moved by the sermon, but there 
was something about Him that arrested and riveted 
their attention, that the Gospel does not quite ex- 
plain. But cases that are vastly clearer than this are 
such as His making a whip of small cords and going 
into the temple and driving out the cattle and the 
money-changers, upsetting the tables and pouring 
out the money ; and no one seems to have argued 
with Him, or to have withstood Him ; and the Gos- 
pel-narrative makes no effort to explain it. The 
scourge of small cords is no shadow of explanation. 
There was something in the Lord's eye, or some ema- 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 



127 



nation from Him of resistless sovereignty that the 
story does not tell, could not tell probably. Then 
we see in another place that His enemies were afraid 
to arrest Him. They sent officers for this purpose. 
They came back without Him. " Why have ye not 
brought Him?" the Pharisees asked. " Never man 
spake like this man "; and the matter dropped there. 
And then further on, when they came to the point of 
arresting Him they shrank back in a most inexplic- 
able manner from laying hands upon Him, and as the 
evangelist says, "went backward and fell to the 
ground." When we have read the incident I won- 
der what reason we have assigned to ourselves for 
behavior so unsoldierly. What sight hindered them, 
or thought detained, or invisible influences repressed 
them? If we had not become habituated from child- 
hood to the idea of Judas' suicide I think that it would 
set us all a-querying in what way Christ had so work- 
ed upon the traitor that death was pleasanter to him 
than life with its bad retrospect. The Bible is inter- 
esting in what it does say and almost as much so in 
what it does not. Pilate in saying — " what I have 
written I have written," shows ample evidence of 
surmises and suspicions that Scripture does not clear 
up. And the Roman centurion that stood watching 
Him while He was dying on the cross, from some 
cause that the story does not make clear, had sug- 
gestions started in his mind that were quite un- 
Roman. 



128 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

And I think that whatever we read in the Gospel, 
whether bearing upon the Lord's relation to His 
enemies or to His friends, we shall continually find 
results out of all proportion with stated causes, and 
be put upon reading a great deal between the lines. 
I am persuaded that we lay too much stress relatively 
upon those acts and words of the Lord that were so 
definite that they could be reported, and vastly too 
little upon those finer influences that went out from 
Him, which were too urgent not to be effective, 
but too subtle to be comprised inside any reporter's 
record. 

Now while in this I have had it as one object to 
make us more inquisitive and appreciative readers of 
the holy story of the working Christ, I have had also 
another purpose. We have, I am sure, overestimated 
the redemptive power of the conspicuous acts of Christ's 
life, and underestimated the efficacy of the influence 
that silent and gentle was in course of constant ema- 
nation from Him. We have forgotten that the life 
that was the light of the world was primarily not His 
teaching, His miracle, or His cross, but the life that 
was in Him. " I am the life." 

Quite the same mistake we as Christians make 
about ourselves, for in the measure that Christ has 
been formed in us, we too are the light of the world, 
as Jesus said upon the mountain, and our life that is 
the light of the world is the light that is in us. We live 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 129 

in a demonstrative time and in a demonstrative town. 
It is quite in the spirit of the period to estimate 
things and men by the figure they will make, to cal- 
culate values cubically and rate forces by their capac- 
ity of detonation. And this idea has stolen into our 
theories of Christian aggression till a man signifies 
pretty nearly nothing as an agency of evangelization 
unless he is doing some conspicuous and loud work 
for Christ. I am not antagonizing any most earnest 
and indefatigable Christian worker that may be among 
us ; there is no quarrel between us. All I want to 
claim is that if a man is a Christian there are no 
better Gospel results wrought .in the world, than 
will be wrought by the simple, quiet, every-day shin- 
ing of his Christian life and light. " Ye are the light 
of the world," Christ said to His disciples. I have 
heard that explained as meaning that Christians are 
to become a light by going about and preaching and 
exhorting men to holy affections and practices. Well, 
now, it means nothing of the kind. It does not mean 
that Christians have got to do something in order to 
become a light ; it means that just because they are 
Christians they are a light. " Ye are the light/' not 
the great brilliant deeds that you perform, not the 
great persuasive words that you speak. " Ye are the 
light." Christians shine without being obliged to go 
out of their way — without being obliged to put them- 
selves to any pains. It is in the very nature of the 
6* 



I 30 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

case that light should drop off from them as light 
falls from a blazing candle. Salt, too, does not have 
to go out of its way to be conserving. It is just its 
nature to conserve. Ye are the salt of the earth. It 
is the whole drift of this allusion to the light and the 
salt, lodged as the allusion is in this chapter right in 
the midst of a discourse that is busy only with the 
sweetnesses and purities of the inward life, to teach 
that the same thing holds of Christian men as holds 
of Christ, that it is the life, the man himself in his 
Christianed nature, that is the light of the world. 
And while the delay of the millennium is certainly 
due in part to the feeble refulgence of the preachers 
who shine in a public way on Sunday, it is doubtless 
due as much to the feeble refulgence of the laymen 
who shine in a less public way on week-days. 

And there are several advantages which you as lay 
luminaries have which pulpit luminaries do not have. 
A living Christian out among men in daily employ- 
ment is an incessant fountain of Gospel light ; that is, 
if he is a Christian. He preaches all the time. A 
formal discourse is but for a half hour. A Christian 
life lived out among men is all of it text, argument, 
and application, and never lets go. When our Sun- 
day service is over, whatever effect may have been 
produced, is most likely evanescent ; and, when we 
turn up our faces to be preached to a week hence, 
the service will not find us exactly where to-day 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 



131 



leaves us. A sermon does not record itself in fast 
colors. Nothing is more evaporative than a good 
impression. But a holy life preaches all the time ; it 
is an incessant sermon. It accumulates effects and 
adds results together. 

Another advantage your preaching will have will 
be that it will reach men that never come into the 
house of God to hear preaching of a more formal 
kind. There will be just as many Christian pulpits 
in the streets and shops and banking-houses down- 
town to-morrow as there are living Christians down- 
town to-morrow. The reference is not to talking the 
Gospel, but to the Gospel power there is in the sim- 
ple living of a man that has had Christ formed in him. 
And you will reach a much larger congregation than 
is gathered here, and a much more miscellaneous one, 
and of which, perhaps, not a tenth hear the Gospel 
preached in a formal way. You have in this respect 
eminent advantage. Ye are the light of the world. 
Ye are the salt of the earth. Suppose yow have 
twenty unconverted men in your employ. You are 
a Christian. It is safe to assume that the twenty are 
becoming inclined toward Christianity under the pres- 
sure of the mellowing and subduing quality of your 
Christianity. I go to a man and ask him if he will 
take a class in the Sunday-school or mission-school. 
He pleads secular pressure of duty, and very likely 
the plea is an adequate one. But has it occurred to 



1 32 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

him that by arrangement of Providence his uncon- 
verted employes or companions are to all intents 
and purposes a mission-class held six days out of 
seven under the discipline of his Gospel living? 

" Down-town is a busy place to think of importing 
into business hours Gospel aims and influences." I 
know ; but did you never think of it that the light 
that is run up on the mast-head of a steamer never has 
to stop in order to shine ? Did it never occur to you 
that the exceeding velocity at which the sun moves 
never interferes with its refulgence? It would be a 
sickly sort of luminary that would have to stop in or- 
der to shine. A Christian ought rather to be in that 
respect like a fire-fly, which lightens most just when 
it is on the wing. 

The simple living of the lay Christian has this ad- 
vantage, too : that his preaching is unprofessional 
preaching. There is little likelihood that his piety 
will be discounted. There are certain aspects of min- 
isteriaMife that are liable to put men upon thinking 
about the clergy a little in the vein in which Satan 
thought about the man of Uz, when he asked, " Doth 
Job serve God for naught? " I confess to you frankly 
that there is to me something a little awkward about 
this. Christ had not where to lay His head. Paul 
was content with food and clothing. The present ad- 
justment may be quite right, but it is certainly the 
case that more would be accomplished for men in the 



LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 



133 



direction of salvation if they were quite sure that 
everything done clerically for souls was done with a 
pure and untarnished desire to save souls. I only 
mention this to show the advantage in which a lay 
Christian is set in this particular. The unconverted 
man who comes under the discipline of your simple, 
uncompensated example, will feel no impulse to make 
that example mean less by deductions and subtrac- 
tions. As things are now, there is nothing that can 
quite compare for power with piety and preaching, 
that have about them no taint of the professional. 

I mention only one other advantage that you have 
as preachers, and that is, that in the Gospel life of a 
layman, practicing and preaching do not get divorced. 
The two are naturally in wedlock. In Christ the two 
never fall asunder. Preaching may be practical, 
preaching may be about life, and yet be just far 
enough from life to disclose a cleavage. " Cheap as 
preaching " has become a proverb. Between you and 
those to whom your Christian living addresses it- 
self preachingly, there is no such unlikeness of temp- 
tations and pursuits" as to make your holy living seem 
to them in the least degree unreal or impracticable. 
The principles by which you profess to live tell upon 
them with a power redoubled by your own witnessed 
observance of those principles. There is no discourse 
on honesty so pungent as to do honestly. Dishon- 
esty would soon become infamous in New York if 



I 3 4 LIGHT THE OUTCOME OF LIFE. 

every man that professes to be a Christian would 
simply observe the eighth commandment. 

The power of the Church is then really in the pew, 
not in the pulpit. And now as we go into our place 
of prayer for a few moments, I want each to make 
serious with the question whether there is in him 
any of that life that is the light of the world. 
Whether in the midst of the unsanctity and irreligion 
that prevail he is a .light shining in a dark place, a 
living gospel open to the perusal of every eye, a living 
epistle known and read of all men. 



X. 

PROSPERITY A TEST. 

" When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou 
shall bless the Lord thy God." — Deut. viii. 10. 

Which occurs in Moses' farewell charge to the 
Hebrews. Moses had long stood to his people in the 
relation of father as well as general, and, like a father, 
has at the end a good many last words to speak. 
This whole book of Deuteronomy is made up of last 
words ; his last will and testament to the Hebrew 
people. He wanted to clinch the instruction that 
had been given them already ; wanted to make sure 
of them. His anxiety outran his responsibility. He had 
been their saviour in the past^and now would like to 
take out a policy of insurance in their behalf for the 
time to come. It was hard work for him to vacate 
his office and speak the last word he would have the 
opportunity to speak officially. There is something 
quite pathetic in this long, lingering, holding on of 
his, in this wordiness of the old man, that does not 
know how to stop and has not the heart to stop. 

And they needed everything in the shape of coun- 

(135) 



136 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

sel and insurance that could be given them. They 
had hardly earned the confidence of their leader. He 
did not much believe in the Hebrews. This exhorta- 
tion of our text was spoken by him with evident 
misgivings. He did not expect they would bless the 
Lord w 7 hen they had eaten and were full. They had 
hardly been a match for adversity, still less could they 
be expected to be for prosperity. He knew them, 
knew the ins and outs of them. He had carried 
them forty years and been one of them a hundred 
and twenty. He understood their composition and 
drift. They were a nation of backsliders, fluctuating, 
paroxysmal. Their history was full of ebb-tides. 
They were not to be trusted. God had kept them 
worn down into manageableness simply by force of 
disaster ; had always driven them with a curb and a 
check. Liberty they regularly corrupted into license. 
Every possible luxury had accordingly been withheld 
from them ; temptations reduced to a minimum ; 
intercourse with other peoples thwarted; even their 
food made purposely unsavory and monotonous. All 
of this even had scarcely kept them within bounds of 
duty and decency. They were not allowed their own 
way, for the clear reason that their own way was uni- 
formly a bad way. 

The point is reached now, however, where a new 
experiment is to be tried with them. There are some 
elements in the case that warrant at least a hope that 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 137 

the experiment will succeed. The wilderness and the 
manna are now put behind them ; in front is the 
Jordan, and across the Jordan cities and well-watered 
plains : a land flowing with milk and honey. God 
has kept His people restrained by the taut rein of 
hunger and reverse. How will they bear the longer, 
laxer tether of plenty and prosperity? It lay in 
Moses' thought as a question. It was the burden 
and anxiety of his mind as he looked across imagin- 
atively and prophetically to the larger and more 
affluent days that awaited them. In this there is the 
explanation and point of our text, " When thou hast 
eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy 
God." Springing from this situation are a number 
of considerations that will bear practically, in the 
way, I hope, both of instruction and relief. 

It is important to understand and be assured that 
it is God's ambition for His people to load them as 
heavily with luxuries and gladnesses as they can bear. 
Evil and suffering are all around us, but it is a part of 
our faith in the fatherliness of God to believe that 
" He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children 
of men "; and to say with the psalmist, "I know, O 
Lord, that Thy judgments are right, and that Thou in 
faithfulness hast afflicted me." The universe is in 
the interests of comfort and happiness and joy. It 
is God's ambition that we should eat and be full. 
Everything looks to a good time coming. Every- 



1 38 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

thing is contrived to bend toward a blessing; God 
started man in Paradise; as good a Paradise as he 
could bear and a good deal better ; and all that lies 
after Paradise is preparation for a Paradise improved. 
The Paradise regained is not the Paradise that was 
lost. God does not willingly afflict. There is no 
sorrow that has not lodged in it the possible seed-ker- 
nel of fruition. Faith in the fatherliness of God in- 
volves all this. When we experience vexation and 
tribulation we must always bethink ourselves of the 
issue to which in our Christian faith we are sure it is 
divinely designed to conduct. The Lord took no 
pleasure in confining the Hebrews within the wilder- 
ness ; everything was preliminary to Canaan. Like a 
musician he strained the strings that their tones 
might be in accord. God is ambitious that His chil- 
dren should be happy. It is the ambition of every 
man to be happy. God wants the same thing for us 
that we want for ourselves. We crave satisfaction. 
" When I awake/' said the psalmist, " I shall be satis- 
fied/' God wants to have us satisfied. " There shall 
be no night there." " God shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes." All Scripture phrase, all holy image- 
ry is contrived to show that God wants for us the 
same thing that we want for ourselves. God is on 
the side of man's comfort. " Give her something to 
eat," He said to the father and mother of the little 
girl He had raised from the dead. It is a little thing, 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 



139 



but it shows that the Son of God wants man to be 
comfortable. So when the Lord got breakfast for 
the fishermen that had been all the night toiling fruit- 
lessly on Gennesaret. A little thing, but shows where 
God's interests are, and that He wants to have us eat 
and be filled. A little thing, but reaches a long ways, 
like the light of a flickering candle which, neverthe- 
less, does not stop short of the sky. " Man's chief 
end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him." The moun- 
tain-sermon begins with the promise of blessing. A 
whole octave of blessedness ushers in the Gospel. 
This is a wholesome reflection for our mind to rest in. 
That there is sin in the world and suffering, we can 
get along with as soon as we learn to interpret them 
instrumentally. Sin is a means of Grace, and is 
education toward a better holiness. The world saved 
from sin is a better world and a happier than a world 
that never needed saving. I am certain of all this, 
because I believe the Gospel. The Gospel means 
that God is on the side of man's happiness, from first 
to last, and so fully on its side as to be willing to in- 
cur any expense in order to secure it. There is no 
sacrifice God is not willing to make in order that I 
may be happy. " He that spared not His own Son, 
but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with 
Him also freely give us all things? " I wish we had a 
more actual and producing faith in God as a father, 
so that we could say: "The Lord hath given, the 



140 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 



Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the 
Lord." " There shall no evil happen to the just." 
"No good thing will He withhold from them that 
walk uprightly." " All things work together for good 
to them that love God." Such an estimate of things 
lies before all safe and just discourse upon the prov- 
idences and dispensations of life. 

It is a singular thing, however, that although glad- 
ness is the soul's destination, and a destination that 
God is concerned to have us reach, yet the fact of the 
matter with us is, that gladness is itself very apt to 
impair our capacity for gladness, and to hinder our 
attainment of it. We are, in this respect, like a sick 
man who requires nourishment, but has not the power 
to digest it, and so is harmed by the very thing he 
needs. Recognizing as we do, that every good gift 
is from God, it would certainly seem as though every- 
thing we obtained from Him would be a fresh re- 
minder of Him and a new bond to bind us to Him. 
But we know how it works with children sometimes, 
whose parents, the more they do for their children 
the less are they regarded and loved by their children. 
This was the point of Moses' anxiety in our text. 
He feared that the occupation of a land flowing with 
milk and honey would alienate the Hebrews from the 
very God who gave it to them. In their years of 
hunger and emptiness they had been kept tolerably 
loyal to God, and now he cautions them against 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 141 

neglecting to acknowledge God when they have come 
to a place where they can have their wants satisfied 
and their mouths rilled. 

This fact of the dereligionizing power of prosperity 
is a practical and a serious one. Prosperity is dan- 
gerous — dangerous for a man, a family, a country ; it 
makes men indifferent, infidel, atheistic ; if not in their 
creed, at least in their life. The more God gives us, the 
less, as a rule, we have of God. It is not easy to escape 
being injured by mercies. It is easy to be ruined by 
success : success is very often failure, and failure suc- 
cess. It is surprising how soon children come to 
take the conferments of their parents as a matter of 
course. It is surprising how soon we come to take 
the conferments of God as a matter of course. Paul 
said to the Lycaonians : " God left not Himself with- 
out witness, in that He did good and gave us rain 
from heaven and fruitful seasons/' And yet I imag- 
ine that even among us there is a considerable num- 
ber who would think it a bit old-fashioned either to 
pray for rain or to think of God when it comes. To 
our eye God gets eclipsed by His own bestowments. 
It is a simple thing, but I incline to think it means 
something that when we thank God for our daily 
food — ask a blessing, as we say — we thank Him before 
we have eaten rather than after. We are more de- 
vout when we are hungry than when we are sated. 
There is thus an interior connection shown between 



142 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

prayer and fasting. Want, within certain limits, is 
more favorable to piety than plenty. Even as early 
as Eden the luxuries of the garden obscured the 
giver of the garden. The tree came between Adam 
and Eve and the Lord God. When they had eaten 
and were filled they ceased to bless God, and became 
estranged from Him. 

I have, in certain instances, at your request, prayed 
friends of yours clear across the Atlantic, out and 
back. Such requests are numerous in the months of 
June and September especially. I would not dis- 
courage such requests. I believe there is saving 
power in the concerted prayer of a congregation of 
worshippers. It is, beside, pleasant and comely that 
such a family of believers as this should remember 
any one of our number that is in any kind of exposure 
or peril. But there has been hardly an instance in 
which, after the safe arrival out, or home, of the 
party prayed for, I have been requested to return 
thanks to God for having made their voyage safe and 
prosperous. We bless God when we want anything, 
and congratulate ourselves when we get it. " When 
thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the 
Lord thy God." It takes considerably more piety to 
make a man thankful to God for what He has done 
than prayerfully dependent upon God for what we 
would like to have Him do. It is for that reason 
that thanksgiving forms so small an element in our 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 143 

prayers; and one reason, most likely, why our peti- 
tions bring us so little that is new, is that our thanks- 
givings so scantily recognize what is old. You re- 
member Luke's story of the ten lepers that Jesus 
healed. " One of them when he was healed turned 
back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell 
down on his face, giving Him thanks: and Jesus an- 
swering said, Were there not ten healed? but where 
are the nine?" Ten of them had faith enough in 
Christ to supplicate Him when they were sick, but 
only one had faith enough in Him to thank Him 
after he had been made well. It takes a good deal 
more grace to be devoutly satisfied than it does to be 
devoutly solicitous ; so that Moses was enjoining no 
easy thing upon his people when he bade them bless 
the Lord when they had eaten and were full. 

It is the tendency of the heart to forget God, and 
the more sunshiny things are, the more likely is that 
tendency to become realized. Our thoughts and re- 
gards are continually slipping away from Him. Our 
eyes drop from God to some representation of Him, 
and we become idolaters ; from God to some theories 
of Him, and we become philosophers ; from God to 
the gifts He confers, and in our fulness we fondle the 
gift and ignore the giver. The benefit monopolizes 
the eye, and the tree in the garden comes between 
Adam and the Lord God. " He gave them their re- 
quest," said the psalmist, " but sent leanness into their 



i 4 4 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

soul." Agur appreciated our tendencies when he 
prayed : a Feed me with food convenient for me, lest 
I be full and deny Thee." Exactly the secret of 
Moses* anxiety in our text : " Lest I be full and deny 
Thee." Whatever effects we happen to have, culture, 
wealth, beauty, possession of any kind, our energies 
and loves tend to soak into them as the sand drinks 
in the rain. We are all the while slipping toward the 
surface of things, working out from the core to the 
peel. The plow has to be continually pressed, else 
the share will slip out onto the turf. It takes much 
beside still weather to make things flourish and ma- 
ture. Some one has said : " The lightnings take part 
with the dews in the growth of the world." Sunshine 
is not the only parent of the harvest. Men fell in 
Paradise. Angels fell in heaven. 

I do not know that there is any good thing that 
can not be given in so great measure as to alienate 
the recipient from the Giver. Even the gifts of the 
divine Spirit are no exception. The fruits of the 
Holy Ghost can be produced in us so profusely as to 
work disaster. You remember how when the seventy 
returned from their evangelistic tour they commenced 
to parade the fact of the submissiveness of the devils 
unto their word. And the Lord rebuked them and 
bade them rejoice, rather that their names were writ- 
ten in heaven. We sometimes think it is well and 
possible for us to have all the grace we are willing to 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 145 

receive. I am not sure of that. I have met people 
that I thought had more grace given them than they 
had grace to bear ; people that were really so holy as 
to be conscious of it. The pinnacle of the temple, 
even, is not quite a safe place to sit. St. Paul men- 
tions his inexpressible experiences when caught up 
into the third heaven, and says his thorn in the flesh 
was given him as a counterweight to prevent his 
being overcome by the abundance of the revelations. 
I think one reason why we have not more spiritual 
power given us is that we have not the strength to 
sustain more ; we have not grace to carry and exer- 
cise more grace with composure. Men get puffed up 
even by their heavenly enrichments. This is one 
reason doubtless why revivals of religion in our 
churches are of so short duration. When the condi- 
tion of a church is in general one of listlessness and 
stagnation^ a few earnest souls can be so burdened and 
crushed with the helplessness of the situation as to 
cry up unto God with prayers that take directly hold 
of the throne of divine grace, and Christians be 
quickened and souls converted. But when the work 
has been progressing for a time, men slip almost in- 
sensibly into the idea that the work is their work, into 
a consciousness, and then a conceit, of spiritual power 
as their power, and the Holy Ghost withdraws and 
the revival stops. We might have a revival all the 
time if we would be as conscious that the work 
7 



146 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

is God's work when it has been in progress six 
months, as we were when the work first commenced. 
Men who can be as humble as children and as full of 
the Holy Spirit as an apostle are the men whom God 
delights to honor in the enlargement of His Church. 
If you will mark all the passages in the Acts and the 
Epistles that indicate the humility of the apostles 
and their ability to acknowledge and bless the Lord 
when they had eaten and were full, you will see very 
much of the reason why it was that in apostolic times 
the Church was continuously progressive. 

Any possession or power we may happen to have 
stimulates self-consciousness, and that alienates us from 
God. I once heard a professor in one of our popular 
classical schools make this petition at evening prayers : 
" O Lord, Thou to whom the darkness is as the light, 
we commit ourselves unto Thee for the night, praying 
that Thou wilt care for us in those hours when we 
can not so well take care of ourselves. ,, It is so easy 
to think that we can almost get along alone, and 
should hardly need to put our trust in God were it 
not for dark nights, and days that are stormy. Such 
a prayer as the one just mentioned is, of course, an 
extreme instance, but is interesting as being symp- 
tomatic of human tendency, and is perhaps in its 
spirit not totally unlike that " Now I lay me " which 
we prayed as children and continue to use, still, some 
of us. 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 147 

It is such facts as these that explain why it is that 
our lives have sometimes to be made desolate and 
vacant. Read the entire book of Judges, and you 
will find it the continuous repetition of the same 
sequence of events. When the Hebrews had gone 
across Jordan and tasted the milk and the honey and 
were full, they stopped blessing God, just as Moses 
told them not to do, but as he expected all the while 
they would do. Then the Lord sent in upon them 
an invasion of Philistines, or of Hivites, of Jebusites, or 
Moabites or Midianites or Ammonites, who ground 
them, and trampled upon them, and devoured them 
till they were willing to cry unto the Lord and ac- 
knowledge Him again ; and then a deliverer would 
arise (the man always comes when the times are ripe) 
and drive out the invaders ; and the Hebrews would 
rejoice in their goodly land till they had eaten and 
were filled once more, and God had fallen out of their 
thought and the tragedy had to be repeated again. 

This gives' to us the philosophy of disasters in 
national life, and explains to us as well the impover- 
ishments and emptinesses that have to be wrought in 
our individual lives. Men are quite uniformly dis- 
posed to be devout when they get into difficult places. 
Men are like certain kinds of vegetation, which do 
best in poor soil. I have somewhere met with this 
illustration : " The Alpine flower does not bear trans- 
planting, and can only thrive, perhaps like some 



148 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

souls, amidst wind and tempest, with only brief sum- 
mer sunshine and heat." I do not believe there is 
any man but what prays when there is nothing else 
left that he can do. The story is told how " at the 
darkest hour of our civil war, when the life of the 
country seemed trembling in the balance, the Govern- 
ment proclaimed a fast. . The people in immense 
numbers thronged the churches. An eminent citizen 
in one of our Atlantic cities who seldom sought 
God's house on Sunday, was observed on that fast- 
day kneeling devoutly with God's people. When 
asked what brought him to such services, his answer 
was: ' I thought it was high-time to get help some- 
where ; we are in a tight place, and we need it.' ' 
We have seen illustrations of the same considerably 
more recently. There is not a man here who would 
not pray if he stood on the deck of a steamer burn- 
ing at sea or confronted starvation on the desert. 
1 When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt 
bless the Lord." 

It is a large part of the philosophy of distress that 
it makes us look up. We ask when we are hungry. 
When we are empty we are devout. " When he 
slew them, then they sought him," said the psalmist. 
" In their affliction they will seek me early," wrote 
Hosea. The prodigal went back to his father when 
he got down as low as the husks. One of the most 
cordial expressions of gratitude I ever heard was 



PROSPERITY A TEST. 149 

from a man who was suffering most excruciating pain. 
Steady sunshine is ruinous. Jeremiah explains the 
profitlessness of Moab by saying that " Moab had 
been at ease from his youth, had settled upon his 
lees, never been emptied from vessel to vessel, never 
gone into captivity/' We have to be shaken out of 
the stupefying routine of quietness. " Because they 
have no changes, therefore they fear not God," wrote 
David. Earthly splendors eclipse the celestial, just 
as the sun that hangs comparatively close by, so fills 
our eyes with near light that we know nothing, till 
after nightfall, of the larger suns that blaze out in the 
deeps of the sky. We touch things celestial and di- 
vine when the air is not loaded with things human 
and earthly. The bruised flower yields the sweetest 
perfume, and the finest poetry of the Church has 
been inspired in seasons of persecution. Horace 
Bushnell once said : " I have learned more of experi- 
mental religion since my little boy died than in all 
my life before." It was he also that wrote, " Deserts 
and stone-pillows prepare for an open heaven and an 
angel-crowded ladder." St. John did not receive his 
revelations till he was shut up in little sea-girt Pat- 
mos. St. Paul's most jubilant epistle was written in 
jail ; as birds sometimes have their cage darkened in 
order to teach them to sing. 

A considerable number of considerations have 
then, as we hoped, sprung from the situation of our 



150 PROSPERITY A TEST. 

text, of a character both to relieve and to instruct. I 
trust that if we have eaten and are filled with the 
pleasant outward gifts of the Lord, we are able still 
to live in distinct and hourly recognition of Him 
from whom they flow, and to walk with Him in rela- 
tions of reverent but friendly intimacy. We often 
pray that God would enable us to bear adversity; 
there is quite as much need of His grace to keep us 
from falling in seasons of prosperity. Or if you are 
walking in any kind of darkness at all, I pray that 
the God of all grace who hath called us unto His 
eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have 
suffered awhile, may make you perfect, stablish, 
strengthen, settle you ; and that we may all of us be 
so animated by faith in Him who doeth all things 
well, that even the night may be light about us, losses 
only leave in us place for larger gain, and our lives 
draw toward His in daily closeness, even though it be 
a cross that raiseth us. 



XI. 

THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

"Make to yourself friends of the mammon of un- 
righteousness, that when ye fail they may 
receive you into everlasting habitations ." — 
Luke xvi. 9. 

In this verse (blindly, as our version reads it) is 
gathered the meaning of the foregoing parable, that 
of the unjust steward. This verse applies the mean- 
ing of that parable, in a manner practical, and, as I 
think we shall find, in a manner quickening, cheering, 
and comforting. The parable has often been treated 
harshly, and so has been slow to tell the best thing 
that it has to say. It has been puzzled over as a kind 
of divine conundrum, and meanings have been wrung 
from it. Truth is better coaxed than coerced. The 
way to read a parable is the way we read a picture, 
which is a parable on canvas. There does not want 
to be too much trying to see what a picture means ; 
nor a parable. Both are, in this particular, like coy 
children that begin to grow talkative just when you 
let them alone. When our eye is allowed to play upon 
a picture that has been artistically wrought, it will 

(151) 



152 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

gravitate, generally, with a good deal of ease, if al- 
lowed to, to the point where the artist's interest cen- 
tres, and around which other lines and figures have 
been introduced by him as accessories to the main 
effect. 

Another fault in our way of treating these pic- 
tures, these word pictures, is that we overwork them, 
think into them more meaning than it ever lay in our 
Lord's mind to express by them. We see more be- 
tween the lines than there is space between the lines 
to hold. We must be satisfied to find in a parable 
a little truth scattered over considerable ground. 
Parables will be better treated telescopically than mi- 
croscopically. This parable of the unjust steward 
has been shaken through too much fine sieve. 

I said the meaning of the parable is gathered up 
and applied in our verse. We shall spend only 
enough time on the parable to get at that meaning. 
A certain rich man put the administering of his estate 
in the hands of an agent. After occupying the posi- 
tion for a season, his master, for reasons that we need 
not stop to state, gave him notice that after a certain 
time his services would not be wanted. The agent 
had laid up nothing, was not equal to manual labor, 
and too proud to beg. The question that pressed 
upon him was, who was going to take care of him 
after he had served out his notice. After considering 
and then dismissing one expedient after another, it 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 153 

occurs to him that he will compound with his employ- 
er's debtors ; in that way take a mortgage on their af- 
fections, to be paid off in terms of bread and shelter 
after his wages have stopped. The dishonesty of the 
transaction is apparent enough ; but that, let it be 
remarked, is only an accident of the case, a mere ac- 
cessory stroke. He accordingly calls his master's 
debtors to him, one after another, remits in part the 
obligation of each, and while opportunity serves, 
plucks from present circumstances, down sufficient to 
feather the nest upon a higher branch. The man 
who owed a hundred measures of oil was permitted 
to make out a new due-bill for fifty. The debtor who 
owed a hundred measures of wheat was allowed to 
substitute a bond for eighty, and so on around, that 
when he was put out of the stewardship they might, 
at the instance of gratitude, receive him into their 
houses. He made sure of a pleasant home by and 
by, by converting into friendship the resources of the 
instant. 

If now we will make one or two substitutions in 
our verse in accord with the reading of the new revision 
the meaning of the verse and the purport of the 
parable will become easily and pleasantly intelligible. 
The text says, Make to yourself friends of the mam- 
mon of unrighteousness. " The mammon of un- 
righteousness " is a way of saying " the unrighteous 
mammon." Mammon is here the personification of 



154 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

earthly wealth, and called " unrighteous " because it 
is so apt to be unrighteous both in the manner of its 
acquisition and in that of its expenditure. The prep- 
osition of (" Make to yourself friends of the mam- 
mon of unrighteousness ") is in the new revision 
replaced by the expression " b,y means of." So that 
the first clause of the text has now been corrected and 
simplified to read, — " Make to yourself friends by 
means of your earthly possessions." In the second 
clause a single change is shown by the new revision 
to be necessary: "That when ye fail," so it stands in 
our Bibles ; that v/hen it fails (that is, when the earth- 
ly possession fails) is the revised reading. So that in 
its altered form and dress our whole verse runs in this 
way : " Make to yourself friends by means of your 
earthly wealth, that when it fails they (the friends you 
have made by means of it while you had it) may re- 
ceive you into everlasting habitations." The man in 
our story used his resources while he had them to in- 
crease the number of those that loved him, that when 
his resources were gone there might be those who in 
hospitality and affection would welcome him to their 
homes. Now the Lord in our verse applies the les- 
son to His hearers, and says to them for substance, 
— Do you in the same way make to yourselves friends 
by means of your resources, that when your resources 
by and by slip out of your hands, you too may have 
friends away yonder who shall give you a glad and 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 155 

loving welcome, not to temporary residences as in the 
case of the steward, but to the mansions and the 
home that shall be everlasting. Out of the verse as 
thus phrased three or four lessons offer themselves, 
which we pray that the preacher may be so guided in 
conveying, and all of us so assisted in appreciating 
and receiving, that our meditation may prove fruitful 
in wisdom, strength, and comfort. 

Our first lesson has reference to the convertible 
quality of earthly values. Property of one value was 
by our agent converted into property of another 
value, a greater value, and what is important to no- 
tice, a higher grade of value. As a matter of prac- 
tical result, the oil and wheat at his disposal were 
by him converted into, — not more oil and wheat, — 
but into affection and hospitality. Somewhat of the 
same purpose inheres in all trade. Property in 
hand is not treated generally as a finality. No man 
has ten thousand dollars invested, or, indeed, one thou- 
sand, who does not keep an eye pretty steadily open 
to the possibility of doing better with it. That is the 
animus of trade. That is what you mean by watch- 
ing the market. Trade is not an exchange of equiv- 
alents. There is no such thing as barter pure and 
simple. When you lay down one value you do it 
with the purpose of taking up a larger value in its 
stead. You succeed in your purpose, and " make." 
Your purpose miscarries, and you "lose.". The farm- 



156 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

er puts one bushel of seed into the ground and in 
the Fall gathers sixty bushels in its stead. That is 
trade, in a sense ; only nature, and not the ordinary run 
of grain-dealer, is the other factor in the transaction. 

The peculiarity of all this grade of transaction is 
this, that it looks to a return in kind. You plant 
corn to get corn, only more of it. On the street you 
take money which is in one kind of stock and put it 
into different stock; but money is the aim of the 
transaction, only more of it. It is still a return in 
kind. The transaction is legitimate, or may be ; the 
point of the illustration is, that your object in the 
transaction is to get out the same kind of thing that 
you put in, only in greater abundance. It is the 
same thing that our agent would have done if he had 
taken that fifty gallons of oil in the first instance, and 
instead of converting it into affection and hospitality, 
had put it into the oil trade, with the intent of gain- 
ing more of the same commodity in the issue. 

There is another sort of transaction in which 
men engage which has its financial aspect, and yet 
which is a shade off from those just referred to — in 
fact, several shades off. You take a thousand dollars, 
if you have it to spare, and put it into a work of art, 
a painting, for instance, not as an article of merchan- 
dise (you are not supposed to be in the picture-trade), 
but you purchase it as an adornment to your home, 
and it becomes a bright thing there. You hang it 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 157 

upon the wall, and your eye and heart feed upon it ; 
and after you have had it awhile some one makes you 
an offer for it, double, perhaps, what you paid for it, 
and you say, " No ! that picture isn't in the market." 
Now, that is really a great thing. It means that the 
man, however mercenary he may be reputed to be, 
nevertheless has something whose value, even in his 
own estimation, is not readable in terms of dollars 
and cents. Now that is more like our agent in the 
story, w r ho, while he used the purchasing power of 
his oil as a means of obtaining something better, 
would never have willingly allowed that better thing 
to be converted back into oil again. The value of 
his friendship was not with him readable in terms of 
oil, wheat, or other staple. He had gotten up into 
worth of another grade — values of a higher scale. So 
we may have other treasures, such as books, articles 
of vertu, or a house, or rather a home ; for that is 
part of the difference between a house and a home. 
One might be willing to sell his house, but the home, 
though money may have obtained it, he nevertheless 
would not convert it willingly back into money ; its 
value is not computable in terms of pounds, shillings, 
and pence. 

Now that is our lesson just at this point, that 
values lower and higher are ranged like the steps of a 
stairway, each step being placed to conduct to the 
one superior; so that each grade of value is in its 



158 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

best sense worth what it will buy out of the grade 
next above ; that the value of money thus is not in 
the moneys ipso, but in the purchasing power of the 
money. That exhibits to us exactly the real gist of 
all miserliness. With the miser money is not a pur- 
chasing power, but a finality. All values reduce with 
him to a gold basis. To him the meaning of a dollar 
is in the dollar, or at most in the procreative power 
that may lurk in the dollar to make of itself two 
dollars. Interest, affection, effort, terminate in the 
coin. Now that is a lesson that a good many men 
are not learning, that the best significance of a dollar 
is what the dollar will do : that what the oil will pro- 
cure is worth more than the oil. A man of large 
property died here awhile ago, who late in life made 
one or two munificent benefactions, but said before 
he died that he wished he had commenced to give 
earlier. He learned late, but he learned, one of the 
best lessons of life, that a dollar carefully spent de- 
notes more than a dollar scrupulously kept, that the 
best thing about lower values is their convertibility 
into higher values, and that with the man, as with the 
reservoir, distribution as well as accumulation is con- 
ditional to his being either a thing of beauty in him- 
self, or a well-spring of gladness to his times. 

Our second lesson has reference to the fact that the 
time comes, with every man, sooner or later, when 
these lower values cease to signify, and when, unless 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 



1 59 



they have previously been converted into higher 
values of an indestructible kind, our poor friend is 
left stranded in a condition of utter and irremediable 
pauperism. That time, that crisis, of course, is the 
moment of his death. The agent in our story had 
his crisis, of a different kind, to be sure, but never- 
theless intended by our Lord to be typical of death, 
and the agent anticipated his crisis: he got his re- 
sources into such shape that they could survive the 
crisis. The oil and the wheat he could not carry with 
him out of his stewardship — you can not your houses 
and bonds — but while he was still steward he could 
convert some of those staples into a commodity such 
that his discharge from stewardship could not alienate 
it from him. 

That exactly is what we mean by treasure laid up 
in heaven, possession of such a sort that death can 
not impair nor diminish it — of that indestructible 
quality that the death-power can work in it no cor- 
rosion. That was what was intended when it was 
said of a recently deceased philanthropist that he 
took his wealth with him, by which was meant that 
he carried up with him to the heavenly home and the 
throne of God the friendships, the loves, and the 
prayers of the multitudes all around the earth who 
had had their burdens lightened and their lives 
strengthened and sweetened by his tender benefi- 
cence. He indeed took none of his money with him, 



160 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

but before he was called hence he had converted a 
good deal of that money into something which he 
did take with him, and which to-day composes part 
of his crown of rejoicing as he treads the golden 
streets of the celestial city. If you have property in 
buildings you insure it. Insurance is a sort of con- 
tingent and anticipative conversion of combustible 
values into incombustible, so that they will survive 
the conflagration, if it befalls, and be ready to your 
hands on the other side of the conflagration, un- 
diminished and unscarred. Or, if you are a man of 
wealth and your property is scattered, and disaster 
of any kind impends, with the first suspicion of dis- 
aster or the first rumor of war, your instant care is to 
convert it, so far as may be, into values of so impreg- 
nable a sort that the shock of war and its devasta- 
tions will not shatter them, and thus you be let 
through onto the thither side of disaster, with your 
estates and effects in the least possible measure unin- 
jured. Now, my friend, let me ask you if you are in 
the same way anticipating this other crisis, along 
toward which you are stepping a little nearer every 
day? You secure your buildings against disaster. 
Are you in the same way securing yourself against 
death ? And, as the years multiply upon you and 
your hair grows whiter and whiter, are you gradually 
working lower values into higher, converting your 
perishable possessions into forms that are indestruc- 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 161 

tible, and your earthly wealth into treasure laid up in 
heaven ? 

We have not said much about what it is that these 
lower values can be converted into, to the insuring of 
their permanence and indestructibility. Our third 
lesson concerns that matter. " Make to yourself 
friends by means of your earthly possessions." Car- 
lyle was speaking quite closely in the line of Scripture 
when he said : " The wealth of a man consists in the 
number of things he loves and blesses, and in the 
number of things he is loved and blessed by." A 
friend, as it is meant here, is a person that has so 
come under the power of our love as to love back ; 
loving us because we loved him. Such friends we 
take with us. Death does not terminate the posses- 
sion. They are value which survives the good-bye. 
They are celestial treasure: if they are gone up be- 
fore, they are treasure laid up in heaven, where moth 
and rust do not corrupt. By this love we do not 
mean mere pleasant acquaintance between person 
and person. That is another matter. It is a Gospel 
affair, this love. It is the same sort of going out and 
losing ourselves in other people that was in Christ's 
case. In Christ's case we call it giving Himself for 
others. That is love exactly, letting go of ourselves 
in the taking hold of another; and one that gets 
under our hold in that way is our friend ; he is our 
treasure ; he is our jewel. He may be here or may 



1 62 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

be there ; we may be here or may be there, but he is 
our jewel. And our possessions of money or talent 
or otherwise will help us make friends, not because 
friends can be bought, but because we can make the 
things we give the emblem to them of our self-giving, 
even as sympathetic tears win our hearts just because 
they are the glistening symbols of sympathy. That is 
certainly a great deal of the meaning of Christ's 
blood ; it came from the heart, and meant heart. 
And men are saved by Him because they are loved 
by Him, and know they are loved by Him. 

And love of this kind, the love that makes friends, 
does not work inside of fixed lines : it is not a matter 
of lines ; any more than warmth will slip along a 
groove or light go by latitude and longitude. Christ 
loved up and down, all the way from the throne of 
His Father to the spirits in the nether prison. Love 
that works at particular levels is always to be sus- 
pected. Christly love is like the sun which sheds its 
beams vertically as well as horizontally. When I 
find a man of great means whose lovers are only from 
the class of the well-to-do, the beautiful, the culti- 
vated, I am not authorized to say that his friends are 
not friends in the Gospel sense of the word ; but when 
I know that the turf on his grave is moistened by 
the tears of the poor, the degraded, I know that that 
man was a Christian. Love that works vertically is 
born only of God. And let me say just there, that 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 163 

there is nothing that the poor and degraded need so 
much as they do love. They need love more than 
they do money ; if we gave them less gold and more 
affection they would be better off in heart, mind, and 
estate. Christ instituted no charitable organization, 
only as every Christian is designed to be himself a 
charitable organization, collector, treasury, and com- 
mittee of disbursement, all in one. Men are to be 
redeemed by love ; love is power, personal power 
working toward another winningly, operating in him 
actuatingly, resting on him as a benediction. Love 
is the redeeming element ; love is the pith of the 
Gospel, the axis on which all turns. And men grow 
surprisingly lovable as soon as we begin to love them ; 
startlingly interesting as soon as we begin to be inter- 
ested in them. And we shall find in people just as 
much heart as we have the heart to find in them. 
As soon as we begin in a Christ-like way to love peo- 
ple we shall discover that they love to be loved. 
They are in our power if our power is heart-power. 
It is an easy thing to make a friend. It is like God 
to make a friend, and a friend is a permanent posses- 
sion, treasure in heaven, imperishable jewel, star in 
our crown of rejoicing, out of which the light never 
fades. 

And the friends we have made in tjiis way, knit to 
us in the meshes of an undying love, if they pass up 
before us will be there waiting for us. That is a part 



1 64 THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

of the meaning of the parable, " That when your pos- 
session fails, those whom you have made to love you, 
may receive you into the home that is everlasting." 
It really takes that to make out the idea of home, 
somebody waiting for you. When you have come 
back from the church-yard where has been laid the 
precious dust of your companion, and have crossed 
the old threshold, and entered the familiar room 
where so many times, as you have entered, a tender 
greeting has been given you, it is just the loss of 
that, and the knowing that he or she is never going 
to be waiting there for you again that unmakes the 
home. So this verse contains another of those hints 
that here and there, like stars dispersed in a dim 
firmament, give our hearts something to take hold 
of and wind themselves about. And so heaven comes 
into a little more real and social relation to us. A 
bridge, light and impalpable, but strong enough to 
bear the freightage of a great hope, gets thrown across 
the interval. I know we are going to have Christ 
there, and so we have Him here ; but that does not 
destroy the need of human fellowships, but rather 
makes the need the greater. We shall love there 
more, not less. That the sun shines in the sky with 
such splendor, makes not other objects less needful, 
but more so. It is through them in part that the true 
power and glory of the sun gets disclosed to us. We 
have Christ here ; and a part of His felt power and 



I 



THE UNJUST STEWARD. 165 

loveliness now is in the beautiful relations that, at His 
hallowing impulse, contract themselves among men. 

It seems a little transcendent to say that there 
Christ is to be our " all." But it does just cover the 
ground to say that there He is going to be our "All 
IN ALL." When you have crossed the sea, and on 
nearing port and coming up to the dock, have seen 
among the throng of eager expectants no eye that 
was looking for you, no face that was flushed with a 
glad welcome for you, your heart has faltered within 
you, and you have turned back a wistful glance over 
the tired leagues that divide you from country and 
friends. But if among the throng you detect a re- 
sponsive eye that is waiting for you, and a face flushing 
with old-time love that has been strengthening with 
the interval, right there, just on the threshold of the 
strange continent, there grows up in you a deep, rest- 
ful sense of home. 

Dear friend, remember that your stewardship here 
is not for long. Use carefully and lovingly the things 
that God has given you. And when it comes time 
for you to depart, may there be many hearts here 
that shall be orphaned by your going, and many 
waiting hearts there that shall be gladdened by your 
coming. 



XII. 
THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 

" God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men 
are!' — Luke xviii. it. 

A PART of the Pharisee's prayer, if it was a prayer. 
More soliloquy than prayer. " Prayed thus with 
himself/' the context quietly and slyly interpolates. 

The narrative leaves us with an unpleasant estimate 
of the Pharisee. The whole trend of the narrative 
conduces to this, particularly the words with which 
the narrative stops, without its being altogether easy 
to explain our estimate. We are continually reach- 
ing conclusions, and right ones, without appreciating 
all the steps that lead to them. This Pharisee inter- 
ests us. Every man is interesting. Almost every 
one loves to watch machinery in operation, and trace 
the play and interaction of its parts. How much 
more when, in place of cogs, wheels, and levers, we 
have the intricate mechanism of motives, passions, 
and purposes playing backward and forward upon 
each other. The Pharisee, then, is interesting. There 

was something at fault in him without our being 
(166) 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 167 

easily able, perhaps, to specify with exactness what 
that fault was. 

The publican told the whole truth about him- 
self, so far as he knew it, when he confessed him- 
self a sinner. For all we can infer the Pharisee also 
told the whole truth about himself, so far as he was 
aware of it. The publican was a sinner and knew it. 
The Pharisee was a sinner and didn't know it. One 
had the sense of sin, the other had lost it. The pub- 
lican knew sin as sin, felt sin as sin ; the Pharisee did 
not. That was the worst feature of his case, the most 
difficult and perplexing feature. If it happens that 
you are a teacher, the most difficult pupils you have 
to instruct are not the most ignorant ones, but those 
that have not the sense of their ignorance. Some of 
the most delicious pupils I ever had anything to do 
with were those who knew least, but who knew enough 
to know how little they knew. That afforded me as a 
teacher something upon which I could fix and fasten. 
The pride of ignorance is like the stopper in an empty 
bottle, which renders the interior vacuum inaccessible. 
Change the terms and we have the description of our 
Pharisee. The narrative means to have us under- 
stand that he was as much in need of God's mercy as 
the publican, but that he was without that sense of 
need that made mercy apropos and intelligible. In- 
struction derives its meaning from a sense of igno- 
rance ; medicine, from a sense of disease ; liberty, 



1 68 THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 

from a sense of bondage ; mercy, from a sense of ill- 
desert ; pardon, from a sense of guilt ; the Gospel 
means in the second instance only as much as sin has 
meant in the first instance. Therein is the relation 
of the law to the Gospel, not that the law can save 
anybody, but that it may produce in man the sense 
that he needs to be saved : " By the law is the knowl- 
edge of sin," said Paul. If we are certain we are 
right we do not ask to be set right. They that are 
whole need not a physician. An umbrella means 
nothing in dry weather. 

The Pharisee did not feel sin as sin. That is the 
worst effect of sin that it dulls the sense of sin and 
wears out the conscience. It is a sad wreck that costs 
the captain his ship's compass. Conscience is the 
moral eye, the ethical sensorium. The hardening of 
the heart is in morals just what the softening of the 
brain is in intellectuals; ethical insensibility, idiocy ; 
horrible because of the magnificence it just misses. 
" Dead in trespasses and sins." " Sin when it is finish- 
ed bringeth forth death." That is my conception of 
devil, unconscienced intellect ; personality that has 
worn out its conscience till it has no sense of holi- 
ness or sin any more ; has lost from the harp forever 
the string that sounded that note, and hell a great 
moral madhouse. " The devils fear," says the Scrip- 
ture, which is not much. So does the imbecile, the 
madman, and the dog. If I thought, perhaps Satan 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 169 

had left in him even a remote suggestion of con 
science, there would be just so much possibility of 
penitence, and penitence is heaven's latch-key. 

Christ therefore gained little hold upon the Phari- 
sees, and gave them little attention. He was known 
as the friend of publicans and sinners. A man may 
do a bad thing, a gross thing. That does not signify 
so much as whether there remains in him power to 
appreciate the badness as badness, the grossness as 
grossness. The power to loathe one's self is candidacy 
for sainthood. The force of an appeal must lie at 
least the half of it in the heart of the man appealed 
to. Tone is half in the air and half in the ear. 
Preaching, Christ's preaching, waited, for its effect, 
upon echo. There was in the heart of the Pharisee 
no echo. He did not find himself under Christ's 
preaching, and feel himself. He was not reached, 
touched. The words even of the Lord did not find 
out in him the nerves. His heart did not understand 
the language in which Christ addressed him. Such 
preaching is discouraging and hardly pays. A gross 
sinner with lively moral sensibilities is closer to the 
kingdom than a " proper" person, void of moral reso- 
nance. We are not lost till our moral sense is gone — 
our appreciation of right and wrong as right and 
wrong ; when that is gone we are lost, even though 
the grave be forty years away. Hell is both sides of 
the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear 
good clothes. 



170 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER, 



And then, too, a man may be to all intents and pur- 
poses lost even before the sense is altogether gone. 
When you see a man dropping down the rapids, it is 
not necessary for him to go over the falls before you 
will say of him that he is lost. When you see a man 
falling from the roof toward the pavement you will 
not wait till he strikes before saying of him that he 
is a dead man. There are matters here that the best 
as well as the worst one among us needs to think 
about. This getting into a current and having it 
sweep us, this pressure of momentum that is taking 
on new increments, is earnest business. I do not 
know how any man can see himself even in a single 
instance conquered by temptation, and not suspect 
his own awful possibilities. To do deliberately what 
is wrong is to confess that lust has more the manage- 
ment of us than conscience. Twelve ounces of lead 
have outweighed eleven ounces of gold. Our only 
hope is less lead or more gold. To do wrong and not 
be pained by it is the first installment of damnation ; 
it is beginning to be a devil — unconscienced intellect. 
Numbness that does not disturb us is the fore-porch 
of death. It is very near to dying already to be 
chilled in the winter storm, to grow sleepy without 
being alarmed by our sleepiness, and not to like to 
have our friend arouse us. " Awake, thou that sleep- 
est ! " " I know it," says the old hearer of the Gos- 
pel, "but I don't feel it." Poor man. 






THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER, 



171 



And there is much of that same thing abroad and 
at home. We all understand one another here, for 
we are mostly sharers in one experience. This is 
part sermon, part soliloquy. I want something for 
myself here, and I want the same for you. I want 
the wrong to cut a deeper, bloodier gash into my 
heart when I either do the wrong or see it done. 
" Dead in trespasses and sins." "Dead." A good 
topic for a sermon would be, " Remorse as a lost 
art." I have told you before now that I feel quite a 
little admiration for Judas. My admiration comes 
back to me again this morning. Whatever he lacked, 
he had a genius for remorse. Sin stung him. " I 
have sinned." Remorse was the rope with which he 
hung himself. 

Something of this has gone out of our lives since 
we were little. Witnessed vulgarity of speech or act 
grieved us when we were children. Those were the 
times when we used to go to our mother and with 
brimming eyes confess our own wrong and tell her 
all about it. It took us a great while to make up 
our mind to tell that first lie, and it took us a good 
while to get over it after we had told it. There is 
something about a child, after all, that can hardly be 
improved upon. " Suffer the little children to come 
unto Me," said the Lord, " for of such is the kingdom 
of God." I know it is a bad world and a bad city we 
live in ; but I do wish that all these children might 



172 THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 

be so kept that this delicate sensitiveness should all 
be preserved in them, that they should never cease to 
be wounded when they see what is evil, and never 
part with their facility of penitence over whatever 
they themselves do that is wrong. 

This keen and pained appreciation of what is evil 
in us is an element that is sadly lacking in our ex- 
perience, and we would have more of it if we were 
better men and women. The shadow that is cast 
is just as dark as the interrupted light is bright. 
The more we know, the more thoroughly we appre- 
ciate the vastness of our ignorance, and the farther 
the hallowing work has progressed in our hearts, of 
course the more conscious we become of the residue 
of unhallowed elements still lingering inwardly. 
When the grace of God has really begun to work in us, 
our first impulse will no longer be to say, I am as good 
a& this man and better than that man, — to say, " I 
give so much," or "I do this, or that, or the other"; 
all of that is exactly our Pharisee ; but, u Lord, I am 
a sinner; be merciful unto me." When we obtain a 
strong, clear sense of holiness, the first thing that 
will show itself in the light of it will be the unclean- 
ness of our heart and of our life. When a sunbeam 
is let into the dark room, the first thing that the light 
reveals is the specks that float in the light. The pub- 
lican did not find God because he confessed his sins, 
but he discovered and confessed his sins because he 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 173 

had just found God and felt the holiness of Him, and 
if ever that Pharisee also found God he ceased his 
complacent soliloquy and the advertisement of his 
beneficence, and knelt down just where the publican 
had knelt, and (not soliloquized any more, but) prayed, 
" Lord, be merciful to me a sinner." 

I shall mention two or three of the ways in which 
we can keep this sense of right distinct and pro- 
nounced, so that evil will be felt by us as evil, sin's 
sinfulness realized, and we be thrown back upon God 
as our deliverer from evil. 

First, avoiding bad contacts. We become like the 
things we touch. We take the features of that we 
look upon. Witnessed vice makes us vicious ; de- 
pravity spreads. Vileness becomes less and less 
repulsive the more we look at it. " Vice is a monster 
of such hideous mien," etc. " Evil communications 
corrupt good manners." An immense amount of 
adult depravity has its foundations laid for it in the 
child's first years. The street is Satan's nursery and 
flashy literature his circulating library. It takes a 
great while to wear out a soul's scar. Sin's colors 
are put on with mordants. Parents are careful to 
keep their children away from diphtheria and small- 
pox. Sin is worse than scarlet fever and more catch- 
ing. A mother said to me only this last week, " I 
will not have my children playing in the street." The 
average boy that runs the streets is a bad boy. If 



1 74 THE PHARISEE'S PR A YER. 

you let a good boy run alongside of a bad boy the 
good boy will learn all the bad boy's tricks, without 
communicating to him any of his own goodness. In- 
iquity is spryer than virtue. Diseases are catching, 
health is not. Flowers die, weeds spread. Human 
nature is like water ; it never runs without running 
down-hill, and left to itself does not stop till it reaches 
the bottom. Of course there is no making a bad man 
better except by coming in contact with him. But 
that is another matter. A missionary will scarcely 
become a heathen by heathen contacts. Paul ran no 
risk in living at Corinth. Sea-water will not set back 
up the river when the river is making steady discharge 
down into the sea. Sunshine that is trying to illumi- 
nate the darkness will not get crushed by the dark- 
ness. Social contact with depraved people depraves 
us ; and notably intercourse with coarse or equivocal 
literature. The one comprehensive fact is that pub- 
lished crime breeds crime. Thinking what is bad 
soils the mind, breaks the edge of moral delicacy; 
and it is all one whether the soiling thought is started 
by crime dramatized, indelicacy sculptured, indecency 
painted, or sin printed in a paper and called news. 
There is no man so clean that he can afford to let his 
mind rest on a dirty thing. 

Another way of keeping the tarnish off our moral 
sense is to call things by their natural and simple 
names. The real name of a bad thing regularly stig- 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER, 175 

matizes the thing, and so stirs in us an antipathy to 
the name. There is much in a name. A fit name 
not only keeps things distinct that are different, but 
keeps the snarl out of our ideas of things. A certain 
amount of distinct thinking is necessary to the main- 
tenance of a conscience that shall work promptly and 
speak definitively. The Lord never compromised 
Himself or the truth through the attenuating words 
employed by Him to state matters He had in hand. 
The whole Bible is a tonic in the method in which it 
meets situations and squares itself to facts. A long 
name for a short sin argues either poltroonery or 
moral obliquity. We can play with words, but words 
will take their turn and play with us. An ambiguous 
name given to a bad thing saps from the bad thing 
its essential ugliness. " Lie " is better than " pre- 
varication "; " adultery" preferable to " conjugal in- 
fidelity "\ " theft " cuts closer to the marrow than 
" embezzlement," though less specific ; which last 
example reminds me of a couple of stanzas I 
met with a while ago, hardly poetic in spirit or 
elegant in form, but moving to the point by straight 
step and a breezy swing, and with an ample com- 
mentary furnished them by last week's events : 

" In olden times when people heard 

Some swindler huge had come to grief, 
They used a good old Saxon word, 
And called that man a ' thief.' 



1 76 THE PHARISEE'S PR A YER. 

" But language such as that to-day 
Upon men's tender feelings grates ; 
So people smile and simply say 
He — ' rehypothecates/ " 

The safest words are always those which bring us 
most directly to facts. If we want to keep good and 
evil apart from each other in our acts, we can not be 
too careful to keep them distinct in our thought ; 
and distinct thinking waits on precise and honest 
wording. 

And now only once more (of course these are 
illustrations merely, not with any thought of ex- 
haustive application). This sense of right, in order 
to be able to do its work, must have positiveness 
given it, and be built up into one of the vertebral 
facts of our life and thought. It is not enough that 
it be not tarnished ; it must be scoured and bright- 
ened. Negative work goes only short ways. To be 
sure, a man may have a distinct sense of right with- 
out being a good man or doing right; still, every- 
thing depends on that sense and comes back to it. 
Without that we have nothing to appeal to, and 
nothing to start from. The Pharisee hadn't it, and 
therefore nothing could be done with him or for him. 
The prodigal son had it (" I have sinned," said he), 
and it opened the way back from the harlot and the 
husks to his father's house. 

But there is no sense of sin without prior sense of 



THE PHARISEE'S PR A YER. i ;; 

holiness. There must be sunshine before there can 
be shadow. And the only way to have the sense of 
holiness stimulated is to see holiness exhibited. No 
beauty, no artist. If my intercourse is only with un- 
schooled people, no sense of ignorance is stimulated, 
no appetite for culture generated. A poorly-dressed 
boy is well dressed till he sees another boy dressed 
better, and then he looks down at his own clothes. 
We are dealing here, then, with fundamentals. The 
moral sense, like any other sense, can be educated, 
and much in the same way. A man does not become 
a painter by having the unshapely kept out of his 
sight, but by having the beautiful kept in his sight. 
Impulses live by bread. So every good thing seen 
or heard is that much toward giving tissue and ten- 
sion to our sense of the good. Sense of the good is 
not goodness. We are not going to forget that ; but 
the right will not become a distinct thing in our 
being without first being a substantial fact in our 
thought. When we have seen a good man, and 
walked and talked with him, it is not so easy to go 
away and do what is evil. 

That gives us the clue to the whole matter. A 
dark room becomes still darker as soon as we go into 
it from out the sun. To the boys I would say, get 
as good a boy as yourself to play with, and, if you 
can, one that is a little better. I mentioned recently 

the thief who, when he was dismantling a room, 
8* 



1 78 THE PHARISEE'S PR A YER. 

turned to the wall the crucifix that stood on the 
mantel. A thief, but not far from the kingdom of 
heaven, I imagine. You remember the other thief, 
and how the Lord and the Lord's cross affected him. 
Let us hold ourselves always as close as we can to 
everything that will keep conscience alert and give 
tension to our own sense of the things that are right. 
There is a sense in which we are consolidated even 
by our own good acts. We go to school even to our- 
selves, as wicked men besmirch themselves by re- 
hearsing their own iniquity, and as David might 
always have been kept nearer God by reading his 
own fifty-first psalm. That is the service that is 
being steadily rendered by every thoroughly good 
man among us ; he is exhibiting holiness as a fact, 
and in that way is chaining unrighteous men to their 
own neglected sense of holiness, and burnishing their 
tarnished ideals till they gleam again. 

The perfect Jesus keep us all close to Him. Good- 
ness incarnate! fleshed holiness! Friend, turn the 
crucifix back from the wall. Let us look on God, and 
our conscience will get its voice ; let us be done with 
looking down to the man that is more miserable than 
we and satisfiedly measuring ourselves against him. 
Look up ! Salvation is over, not under. Let down 
into your soul the ray of glory from off the face of 
God, and you will see the black motes floating thick 
in the bright swarth of it ; and like Peter, with his 



THE PHARISEE'S PRAYER. 



179 



eyes turned on Jesus in the judgment-hall, we will 
find what we didn't know before, and go out and 
weep over it ; and then, like the same Peter on Gen- 
nesaret, feeling that the waters really are parting 
beneath our feet, we shall thrust up suppliant hands 
and cry, " Lord, save me ! " 



XIIL 
THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 

" And he set him on his own beast." — Luke x. 34. 

A SINGLE clause, as you will recognize, from the 
story of the Samaritan. The one act, as it seems to 
me, in which the Samaritan's Samaritanism was most 
deeply lodged, and most gently and suggestively 
evinced. The Samaritan had nothing left him but 
to walk. So we conclude. The weariness of it de- 
noted less to him than his co-traveller's comfort de- 
noted. His own comfort was in having his compan- 
ion comfortable. His consciousness was of the other 
man. He became practically the other man for the 
time ; felt his bruises as his own bruises ; forgot that 
he was not working for himself in working for him. 
He felt not for him, which is nothing but pity. The 
Levite pitied. Pity is speculation. Most of us do 
not care to be pitied. Pity is not enough better 
than indifference to benefit materially either agent 
or recipient. Therefore I say, he felt not for him, 
which is nothing but pity. He felt with him, he felt 

in him, which is sympathy and Gospel. " He set him 

(180) 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 181 

on his own beast. " u Remember them which are in 
bonds as bound with them." u In all their affliction 
he was afflicted." Becoming the other man, that is 
Samaritanism : seeing with his eyes, feeling with his 
sensibilities, subject to his limitations, obnoxious to 
his exposures. This affords us broad pasturage to 
range over as time gives us opportunity. 

That was Christ's way of effecting our recovery, 
our redemption, There is no such thing as saving at 
a distance. Relief stamped with a foreign postmark 
is unable to get underneath our necessity. " The 
chastisement of our peace was upon Him," not because 
of His ill-desert, but because of His identifying Him- 
self with us in our condition of ill-desert. He thought 
Himself into our situation, felt Himself into our situa- 
tion. Our bruises were felt by Him as His .bruises. 
Love is the power of becoming the other man. Sym- 
pathy is two hearts tugging at one load, bent beneath 
one sorrow. If I lose a friend and suffer, and you 
lose a friend and suffer, that does not make it out 
that we sympathize. That would be two hearts tug- 
ging at two loads. Sympathy is two hearts tugging 
at one load — a very different matter in its animus and 
effects. Christ, in order to redeem us, became first 
of all one of us, one among us and in us. He took 
upon Him our nature : got into the inner side of our 
experience. In all our affliction He was afflicted ; 
He had no sorrow of His own apart from our sor- 



1 82 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 

row ; not sorry for us, but sorry with us. And in 
His advocacy for us, He pleads for Himself ; He is 
one of us ; our matter is His matter. What the 
Father grants for us, is so much granted to Him. 
Half of the time when we close our prayer with the 
words " for Christ's sake," we have no sense of their 
import ; they degenerate into a habit of speech, a 
convenient way of getting to the end of our prayer. 
Their meaning lies in the fact of Christ's identity 
with us in the things asked for. It is as though we 
said to the Hearer of prayer, " We do not ask you 
to give it to us because we ask it, but our cause is 
Christ's cause ; Christ wants for us divinely what we 
want for ourselves, only weakly and humanly ; do not 
give it to us because we want it, but give it to Him 
and us because He wants it : give it i for Christ's 
sake.' " " We have an advocate with the Father." 

There is no end of comfort in this doctrine of 
Christ's advocacy. And its assuring power lies just 
in this, that His advocacy grows out of His perfect 
identity with us in our needs, distresses, and aspira- 
tions. We would pray better and more, and with 
vaster confidence, if we would in our supplications 
just enter into the spirit of this, and pray as though 
we thought God's Son was going to take our suit and 
plead it before the Father, not because He wants to 
have us gratified simply, but because He is one of us, 
one in us, and His pulse beats with ours, and our 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 183 

wants are really His wants, and our distresses His 
distresses. That precisely is the drift of the apostle's 
argument at the end of the fourth chapter of Hebrews : 
" We have not an high-priest which can not be touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points 
tempted like as we are." Our high-priest, our advo- 
cate, the apostle will say, has adopted Himself into our 
circumstances. Whatever divineness may be in Him, 
He is definitely ranged also on the human side of the 
disparity between the human and divine ; He feels us 
perfectly in Himself ; He is not merely half-way be- 
tween us and the Father, so that He can reach up in 
one direction, and reach down to where we stand in 
the other direction, but He is entered into our circum- 
stance and into us— made one with us. Then comes 
in the next verse, the conclusion from this premise: 
" Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace." 
Bold praying, based on the divine advocacy of one 
who is as human as ourselves. I think I can pray 
better and with fresh assurance, after having come 
into the truth and meaning of Christ's advocacy in 
this way, and I trust we all can. 

And this is a model of the way in which all 
help comes. We can help a man only by iden- 
tifying "ourselves with him, getting into his cir- 
cumstances, getting into him, becoming he. This 
can be easily illustrated. It holds in all teaching. 
Success in teaching depends on two things — knowing 



1 84 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 

the man you are trying to teach, and knowing the 
thing you are trying to teach him — and the first is as 
essential as the last. The teacher will have not only 
to see things in his own wise way, but at the same 
time to see things in the pupil's own ignorant way, 
and in the same instant stand both above the pupil 
and in him, which answers to the coupled humanness 
and divineness in our great Teacher, Christ. There 
is no understanding a student's difficulties except by 
being able to look at them from the same angle at 
which the student looks at them. Our power to help 
as an instructor stops exactly at the point where 
stops our power to reproduce in ourselves the mental 
perplexities and limitations by which the pupil is 
beset. I can not make him see things as I see them, 
unless I am able first to see them as he sees them, 
which is to say that I must become the student before 
I can become his teacher. When a man has gotten to 
be so old or otherwise that he is no longer able to 
come at things and take hold of things in a boy's 
way, he will never be able to do anything more for 
the boys, and never be able to get a hold upon the 
boys. 

If you have a temptation that you want to get the 
mastery over, the man for you to go to for counsel 
and relief is the man who has been in your place and 
gained the victory that you want to gain. The best 
man to convert a drunkard is a converted drunkard. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 185 

The power to appreciate temptation is the prime 
condition to being able to help others out of tempta- 
tion. In a certain way it holds that the more bad 
and awkward situations a good man has been in, the 
richer may prove his ministry and the more various 
his apostleship. Almost all the men in the Scripture 
story that ever proved a great advantage to anybody, 
had at some time been themselves in sad need of 
succor. The first step God took toward making us 
become like Him, was for Him to become as far as 
He could like us. If you have any doctrinal per- 
plexity, your resort for assistance will always be to 
some one whose doctrinal experience has been com- 
plicated in the same way. And it is not by any 
means enough to be able to understand another 
man's difficulty, burden, temptation ; we need to go 
a little farther and feel it as our own difficulty, bur- 
den, temptation, just as the Samaritan not only 
appreciated his fellow-traveller's distresses, but felt 
them as his own distresses, and therefore set him on 
his own beast ; and as Christ not only understood 
our sins, but Himself put Himself behind our sins, 
underneath them, carried them, and in such a whole- 
hearted way, as really to suffer the pain and penalty of 
them. There is always more or less of the vicarious 
when there is any good done, any release wrought, 
any redemption effected. Redemption is a form of 
sympathy ; it is two hearts tugging at one load. 



1 86 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 

And there is no end of difficulty in really get- 
ting over into the inner side of another man's 
experience, so as to be able to see things as he 
sees them, and so be in a condition to bring 
relief when it is needed, and enlargement and 
amelioration when it is required. There is no do- 
ing anything of account for our neighbor unless, 
first of all, we love him. Now there are some people 
that we do love. Our hearts are not so large yet that 
our affections distribute themselves with anything like 
generality, as the dear Lord's love is wont to do. But 
we do love two or three or half a dozen people, and 
it is full of revelation, the facility with which we can 
appreciate the difficulties, perplexities, untoward 
limitations, and handicapping temptations of those 
few people. It suggests how gentle and generous- 
minded and tender-worded we would be toward all, 
if only we had enough of the love of Christ in us to 
love all as we love a select few. Just as soon as we 
love a man, we can feel and realize the pressure on 
him of his antagonizing environment, and are keen to 
see how allowances ought to be made here and dis- 
counts made there. Love is certain to find some 
way out, just as the Lord himself prayed, " Father, 
forgive them ; they know not what they do." 

If we would get into the interior of another man's 
life, and be able either to rate him at his worth or 
help him to larger worth, we have got to study the 






THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 187 

effects of education, temperament, environment. It 
is more important to know how things look to him 
than how he looks to us. You are to estimate me 
more by my standards than by your own, and I you. 
" Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that 
thing which he alloweth." I have met very few men 
who do not improve on acquaintance. The better I 
understand them and the more nearly I can place 
myself at the stand-point they occupy, of course the 
more they and their motives, acts, and opinions come 
to seem to me as they seem to them. 

We are distanced from one another also by the di- 
verse estimates which different people will accord to 
the same virtue or the same vice. A man who is dis- 
honest and generous will not be able to contemplate 
with patience his neighbor who is penurious, though 
honest. The longer an honest man is honest, the 
harder it will be for him to tolerate a man who is 
disposed otherwise. One man will put the stress on 
one virtue ; another, on another. Conscience by use 
(or by misuse) becomes unevenly pronounced in its 
verdicts. We become more and more impressed by 
the righteousness of what we habitually do that is 
right, and less and less impressed with the unright- 
eousness of what we habitually do that is wrong. 
And all of this embarrasses our estimates of one 
another, and hinders our getting into interior and 
sympathetic relation with each other. The honest 



1 88 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 

miser will not forgive the dishonest spendthrift for 
being dishonest. The dishonest spendthrift will not 
forgive the honest miser for being miserly. 

It will operate to bring us into somewhat closer 
proximity, and at least foster mutual appreciation, 
if we think of it sometimes that a good deal of what 
we call our virtue is only another name for vice in 
us that has not had a clear opportunity to show itself 
nor a fair field in which to work ; and that a good 
deal of what we call our neighbor's vice or criminality 
is a stern way of designating virtue that has not had 
gathered around it suitable checks and limitations. 
Without doubt there is not that degree of difference 
between men in point of inherent depravity, between 
men who walk the street and employ their own tailor, 
and other men who wear uniforms and look out 
between bars, that the discrepant circumstances in 
which they find themselves would seem to denote. 
The best do not rise so far above the average, nor 
the worse fall so far below the average, as the 
more palpable symptoms of condition would indicate. 
This is not to the intent of making wickedness seem 
less wicked, but rather to suggest that the average 
disparity in point of wickedness is not such as to 
work among men any overwhelming sense of isola- 
tion or loneliness. Some particular species of deprav- 
ity that Mr. A. lacks, Mr. B. may possess, and vice 
versa, and mutual repulsion be the consequence. But 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. . 189 

all sins have a common denominator, with hardly 
an inequality in the numerators that is worth men- 
tioning. 

It will draw us into a little closer fellowship if we 
remember that probably not one in a hundred of us 
but would do more evil than we do, were it not for 
the mutual surveillance that we exercise over each 
other. No man is so good that it will not help to 
keep him good if he is watched. The possession of 
unlimited power lies very close to the unholy exercise 
of that power. Few men can be trusted, for example, 
to handle large amounts of other people's money 
with the knowledge that no check is being put upon 
them as respects the methods of their handling it. 
It is foolhardy for any man to allow himself to stand 
in such a position ; but if malappropriation ensues, 
then the public must be instructed to distribute its 
censure with some degree of impartiality between the 
man who malappropriates and the men whose busi- 
ness it was to checkmate such malappropriation, and 
who possibly advertised themselves as officially desig- 
nated for just such or similar purposes. The more 
there is in us of the discrimination, the cleanness, 
and the love of Jesus Christ, the less the difficulty we 
shall experience in getting, in a manner of brotherly 
appreciativeness, into the inner side of even.wicked 
men's experience. Never man dealt with even the 
debased classes of society with such gentle sympathy 



190 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 



as the Lord Jesus Christ, and there is not one of us 
that would like to have a less than He sit in judgment 
at the great day of award. 

And beside this, just so far as we succeed in finding 
ourselves over again in the man who stands next us, 
we shall find it our instant impulse to carry ourselves 
toward him in ways of courtesy and gentleness. Each 
man becomes then only a second self, with but slight 
difference in the make-up and finish. It is hazardous 
living in a town where there are as many people as 
there are here ; it is so easy to fall into the habit of 
looking upon them, ninety-nine per cent, of them, as 
being practically nothing but things. And that con- 
sideration determines in a degree the way we com- 
port ourselves toward them. If I should get wrecked 
at sea and be cast alone upon an untenanted island, 
there are few people even in this heterogeneous city 
that I would not find enough like myself to make the 
tedium of exile more endurable. It is circumstance 
as much as it is personal qualities that determines 
our acquaintanceship and friendship. It might help 
us to remember that one reason we get along with 
ourselves so well, is that we have lived with ourselves 
so long as to get accustomed to our own eccentrici- 
ties and disagreeableness. If we were to meet our 
own duplicate, we should most likely look farther be- 
fore selecting our companion. It is generally allowed 
that it is the unlikes that attract. Unlike saves dis- 
like. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 



191 



All of this gives us matter that we can take into 
daily life with us. Brotherly love is the power I have 
to feel myself in the next man. It is the disposition 
to put myself in his place, in my thought to become 
he, so far as I can, and to determine all my bearing 
toward him by the rule of what I should want done 
to me were I altogether he, which is the "golden rule." 
" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Perhaps 
that does not mean simply, thou shalt love him as 
much as you love yourself ; but love him as though 
he were yourself; feel yourself in him, and so love 
him as yourself. Love is the power to feel an unself- 
ish interest in the next man. 

Here is something in regard to which there can be 
no quarrel among us. Everybody believes in the 
Good Samaritan, and love grows by loving. Whether, 
therefore, I am speaking to the little folks or to the 
older folks, let us always make it our study to see 
how many friends we can make, how many lives we 
can get interested in, how many hearts we can get 
into the inside of, so as to feel as our own pleasure 
whatever is pleasant to them, and so as to carry a lit- 
tle upon our own shoulders whatever burdens them 
and makes them tired and discouraged. In that way, 
my dear friends, we shall be becoming more and more 
like Him whose love-power it is that is working in 
us, whose heart takes gladness from whatever makes 
us glad, and has fellowship with all of us in whatever 



192 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 



makes us sad. A friend is treasure, and a friend who 
has gone up higher is treasure laid up in heaven. So 
that we shall be winning for ourselves the assurance 
that when matters stop here, and things fail here, we 
shall have procured for ourselves the upper hospital- 
ity of them who shall receive us into the habitations 
that are everlasting, and welcome us to the home that 
is on high. 






XIV. 
THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 

" The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which 
a W07nan took and hid in three measures of 
meal till the whole was leavened!' — Matthew 
xiii. 33. 

OUR Lord had His own way of seeing things, and 
therefore had His own way of telling them. His 
style was true to Him, and He true to His style. 
This verse in Matthew was composed in His own 
vein. " Is like unto leaven." He never tried to say 
exact things about a matter, nor to talk clear out to 
the end of the matter. When we read His words 
appreciatively we bear in us always a deep sense of 
overplus and residue. Truth is more than anything 
that any one, even the Lord, can say about it. The 
kingdom of heaven is better, and other, than any- 
thing that any one, even the Lord, can declare of it. 
And so His aim was less to give the mind something 
definite to feel of, than it was to give the heart some- 
thing undefined to feel after. 

Christ's preaching was such a matter that consider- 
able error in the report left us of it would not ma- 

9 ( x 93) 



1 94 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

terially impair its truthfulness, nor materially detract 
from its power. Truth is a separate matter from the 
forms of phrase along which it is conveyed, or the 
forms of thought under which it is apprehended. 
" Not in word only, but also in power," Paul said of 
the Gospel. Truth is in this respect like the light. 
No painter can paint light. He can give you colors, 
the greens, the blues, the crimsons, but he can not 
give you light ; and yet if he is a genius he will suc- 
ceed in filling his picture with those tinted sugges- 
tions that will somehow quicken in you a deep thrill- 
ing sense of light. So Christ, in a similar manner, not 
pointed out to His disciples this particular thing and 
that particular thing, but loaded His sentences with 
suggestions and started in men's minds presentiments 
that went leaping along ahead of the spoken word. 
As in our text, He so served Himself with simile, 
metaphor, as always to leave open the door. He 
never spoke the last word about a matter ; never 
closed a case. Finalities are fatal. Truths He hung 
like suns in broad firmaments with large place for 
them to broaden themselves out in luminously. He 
cut no grooves for men's opinions to slip in, fashioned 
no moulds for those opinions to be cast in ; did not 
care to have them think precisely this, or precisely 
that ; tied them to no nice forms of declaration ; did 
not accentuate with periods. " The former treatise 
have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began 



THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 195 

both to do and to teach.'* And so their minds (the 
disciples' minds) moved as vessels move at sea, at the 
direction of the compass, to be sure, but without the 
sea ever being worn down into ruts and roadways. 
He drew for them pictures of the truth, and then let 
them make what they could of those pictures. A 
truth never can be quite told. It is best seen when we 
are not trying too hard to see it, not straining our 
eyes to see it, as faint stars become visible when we 
look a little off from them. 

Christ's habit, therefore, was not so much to tell 
what things were, as to draw pictures of them and 
mention some familiar thing they were like ; as a boy 
really knows more about the earth when told that it 
is shaped like a big bat-ball than when taught to say 
that it is an oblate spheroid, with a polar diameter of 
8,000 miles. Christ, therefore, was continually telling, 
in an easy way, what this and that was like (drawing 
pictures), which is to say that He taught by parables, 
11 and without a parable spake He not unto them." 
I am not sure that there is anything that Christ said 
that would not be misunderstood were we to suppose 
there was no element of parable in it. And so 
He says in this same chapter : " The kingdom of 
heaven is like unto a man which sowed good seed in 
his field"; "Like unto a grain of mustard-seed"; 
" Like unto treasure hid in a field "; " Like unto a 
merchantman seeking goodly pearls "; "Like unto a 



1 96 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

net which was cast into the sea." It is the constant 
danger of our teaching that we shall make truth less 
by making it exact. A truth felt is more than a truth 
stated. Christ was continually dropping hints that let 
His disciples forward into a new surmise ; kept treading 
down their horizon ; did not let their opinions go to 
seed. He knew how to talk with them in such a way 
as to make them feel that what He did not tell them 
was considerably more than what He did tell them. 
And so while we may not, in contemplating the pic- 
ture in our verse, be able to say much that is exact 
and final about the kingdom of heaven, we may 
nevertheless have fresh suspicions started and our 
hearts acquire new confidence as to the possible 
much which the kingdom of heaven denotes and be- 
tokens. 

" Leaven which a woman took and hid in three 
measures of meal. ,, This kingdom, then, whatever it 
may be, is not an offshoot from the world, but some 
sort of an importation into it. So much, at any rate, 
lies upon the surface of the picture. The woman 
took the leaven deliberately, and hid it in the meal 
with a distinct intent. Which means, among other, 
that the kingdom of heaven is a new ingredient put 
into society. So much is taught simply and effect- 
ively. Not an outgo, but an income. This is vital 
and cardinal ; the hinge upon which the whole mean- 
ing and scope of Christianity bends. She put the 



THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 1 97 

yeast into the dough ; the dough did not develop 
the yeast. The sciences are being reconstructed on 
the basis of development ; we find ourselves every 
day thinking along that line. It is an immense 
thought, this idea of unfolding, this bud and blossom 
conception. It is not specially to our discredit if the 
sobriety of our thinking has been a little disturbed by 
it and our equilibrium jarred. It is not unnatural if, 
in the first flush of discovery, we feel interested to 
have the new idea allowed monopoly. .When a farm- 
er has found a fruit-tree that seems exceptionally 
suited to his soil, he goes about contriving how much 
land .can be spared for its cultivation ; and if his 
enthusiasm reaches to the point of bewilderment, 
quite likely he will go to cutting down old trees that 
were already doing very well in order to give the new 
variety still better chance. In this way the thinking 
world has undoubtedly gone a little daft over the 
idea of development. We can not afford to be too 
fault-finding. Philosophic delirium is better than 
philosophic apathy any time. There is more sense 
in insanity than in insensibility. Matters proceed in 
this way as a rule. It takes time for every new thing 
to settle into the place that was made for it, and that 
it was made for. When our farmer has gotten back 
his composure a little, he will begin inquiring whether, 
perhaps, his farm is not large enough to domesticate 
the new without sacrificing the old variety, and 



1 98 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

whether the same soil may not support both success- 
fully and comfortably. 

Just at this instant, as I say, everything is being 
developed ; man is made the offspring of the brute ; 
the organic, the creature of the inorganic; higher 
grades of enlightenment, the lineal descendants of 
the lower ; and even integrity and holiness blossoms 
that have unfolded on the stalk of the old civilization. 
Christ back there at Tiberias anticipated the nine- 
teenth century, and said for substance : " Yes ; there 
is truth in this view of the matter ; there is develop- 
ment in the moral and spiritual world even. The 
tendency is toward what is better in character as 
well as elsewhere. The fittest tends to survive." 
And yet He goes on to say that the thing works in 
character only just as it does in unleavened dough 
after all. When once the rising process is begun in 
the dough it is certain to go on in a course of steady 
encroachment till the whole mass has been leavened. 
The dough, however, did not produce the yeast, but 
the yeast, when once it had been introduced from 
outside, went to work leavening the dough till it was 
all leavened. It is to our advantage that Christ has 
drawn so accessible a picture of the matter ; and it is 
to our relief that His picture leaves the matter in 
such pleasant and sympathetic relations with material 
events and methods after all. And, indeed, that our 
Lord is able so constantly to illustrate spiritual proc- 



THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 1 99 

esses by physical ones ought to assure us that there 
is somewhere a common ground in which the roots of 
all classes of event hide and intertwine themselves. 

Scripture is everywhere consistent with the repre- 
sentation given in this 33d verse. History did not 
produce Christ. He came into the world from be- 
yond the world. Two Gospels have taken pains to 
determine and establish the fact. The Law, too, 
came into the world ; it was not a Mosaic transplant 
from Egypt, but entered the world at the point 
where Sinai and the sky meet. The whole series of 
communications from Eden to Patmos is consistently 
exhibited as so much importation. Our own experi- 
ence, too, has something to say in the same line. 
We are ruccumbing every day to influences that are 
not set down in the books. A world of unseen facts 
and forces lies against us as the sea lies against the 
shore. Impulses report themselves in us that have a 
foreign air, and that w r e do not know how to call by 
name ; polarities that do not spring from our hearts, 
but that are continually tugging at our hearts, as this 
earth of ours is thrilled with the currents that play 
through the spaces and flash among the stars. What 
we call conscience is no barren discernment between 
what is good and what is bad ; it is the organ through 
which the unseen comes near to us and becomes 
within us both a consciousness and a power. We 
are not left alone ; are not let alone. O God, 



200 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

Thy kingdom comes ! It does come, keep coming. 
An eye peeps in at the skylight. Impalpable fingers 
tap at the window and knock at the door. The sky 
mixes itself with the ground, the sea shimmers under 
the light of the stars, and the meal stirs and is made 
quick at the touch of the entering leaven. ( 

The kingdom of heaven, then, whatever else we 
may say about it, is in the nature of a force. We 
have already intimated as much ; our text teaches 
as much. It is not an idea, not a theory, not a con- 
dition ; it is what yeast is among the meal. It raises 
the dough, makes it alive, more and more alive. You 
may call it God in the world, or the recreative Spirit, 
or the immanent Christ, or operative principle, or a 
power making for righteousness. The name is less 
important than a sense of the realness and vigor of 
the thing that you give the name to. The kingdom 
is an agency, an energy, an efficiency ; something 
that works results, spreads, revolutionizes, takes hold 
of men — and with such a grip that they feel they are 
taken hold of ; changes things, grapples with society, 
transforms institutions, undermines those that are 
bad, establishes and builds up new ones that are 
good ; alters relations among men, habits of society, 
and interrelations between peoples. 

No serious reader of history can track the progress 
of event for any considerable time without detecting 
that there are leavening forces at work which have all 



THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 20 1 

the way along been yielding beneficent and growing 
results. I can not conceive how a man can be in any 
measure familiar with the present and the past ; how 
he can note the peculiar inflection with which from 
century to century event pronounces itself, and ever 
fall into moods of distrust and disheartenment. A 
man can be so environed and familiarized with cur- 
rent evil, and he can so narrow his regard to instant 
depravity as to be put out of all position to pro- 
nounce comprehensively, or to detect the grand 
forward drift of event, certified to by history read 
consecutively and integrally. 

It is vastly to our advantage in this respect that 
we live so long after the era-making coming of our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. There is hardly an 
aspect of life, hardly a single relation among men, 
that has not had during these nineteen centuries 
great and, indeed, pretty steady experiences of bet- 
terment and enrichment. Instance the relation of 
father to children, once a relation of despotism, now 
a relation of affection. Instance the relation of hus- 
band and wife, once a relation of tyranny, now a 
relation of equality, equality before God, and more 
and more so before the law. The rising water-line of 
Christianity is seen in the case of certain unnatural 
vices, once reputable, now unmentionable. Other 
examples are the gradual cessation of serfdom ; the 
improved condition of men under bondage, until the 



202 THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 

final abolition of the whole slave system (and the 
progress of abolition from Christ's enunciation of the 
Golden Rule to the issue of the American proclama- 
tion of emancipation was almost as steady as the 
ascent of the sun from the horizon to the zenith); 
diminished frequency of war, and diminished bar- 
barities in its prosecution ; increased humanity to the 
shipwrecked ; disappearance of torture in eliciting 
testimony ; almost entire abandonment of the duel ; 
improved treatment of prisoners, whether criminals 
or captives ; a nearly complete exemption from per- 
secution for religious purposes; the establishment 
and enormous multiplication of retreats, homes, hos- 
pitals, asylums ; ministering to the sick instead of 
turning them adrift, and caring for the aged instead 
of burying them alive ; settling disputes by umpire, 
and national differences by arbitration. In a word, 
the broader and clearer recognition from generation 
to generation that man is a person, and can therefore 
lay righteous claim to my respect ; and that man is a 
brother, and is therefore entitled before God to my 
love and gentle ministration. Now, each one of these 
specifications admits of prolonged exposition and va- 
rious illustration ; and combined they compose an 
argument of tremendous cogency touching the for- 
ward drift of event and the potency of the leaven 
that is working quickeningly among the meal. 

In this way we are enabled with strong hands to 



THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 



203 



climb up into the confidence that it is God's inten- 
tion to have the whole world in course of time made 
thoroughly good ; "till the whole was leavened," our 
verse says. In mathematics we can calculate the 
whole circumference from the arc, and in history, 
likewise, so soon as we recognize it as substantially a 
divine matter. The kingdom of heaven is a dynamic. 
It holds us back ; it constrains us forward. It is not 
an idea. Society gets touched by it, and wrought 
upon by it, as the meal succumbs to the power of the 
yeast ; not making us as good as we ought to be, but 
preventing our being as bad as it is our nature to be. 
We were made to be laid hold upon, and the king- 
dom of heaven was made to lay hold upon us ; and, 
unless that is taken into the account, history is as 
unintelligible as astronomy without the recognition 
of gravity. 

I wish that any of our young men who are skep- 
tical about the future, and think everything is going 
to the bad, would take the historic facts in the case 
as they are developed, for example, by Uhlhorn in 
his book, " Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism, " 
or in " Christian Charity in the Ancient Church," by 
the same author, or as illustrated by Brace in his 
" Gesta Christi." These are things to be known, 
understood, and appreciated. A power making for 
righteousness is as necessary a conclusion from the 
ascertained facts as is universal gravity deducible 



204 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

from falling apples and falling moons. We talk about 
the great historic forces ; this is one of them, con- 
trived for a purpose as definitely as leaven was de- 
vised to leaven dough. It is one of God's thoughts 
working itself out in realization. I have the same 
confidence in it that I have in gravity. There is 
nothing contingent about the case. The matter is 
all of it in God's hands, and has never been staked 
upon human caprice. Hid in the meal till the whole 
was leavened. That expresses determinate purpose 
and the means for executing it. It is no experiment 
on God's part. God's sovereignty does not get 
elbowed into a corner by man's agency. There is 
no question about the agency ; but God was a sov- 
ereign before man was an agent, and never pivoted 
His supremacy on a contingency. He never made 
men to do as they wanted to do, with only a hungry 
hope that they would want to do as He wanted to 
have them. In the great lap of gravity every drift- 
ing orb lies fostered, and in the folds of God's will 
every erratic creature lies embraced. Hid in three 
measures of meal till all was leavened. 

I do not know that anything exact is denoted by 
the three measures. It may refer to the totality of 
the race as represented by the three sons of Noah by 
whom the earth was peopled : perhaps to the totality 
of the individual man as composed of body, mind, 
and spirit. At any rate, this threefoldness points, as 



THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 205 

usual, to entireness and completeness. The kingdom 
of heaven has come on earth to stay and to work a 
whole work. This irresistibleness is a ground of vast 
encouragement. 

To be sure, this force is one that works stealthily. 
We do not always realize what is being done or that 
anything is being done. This is one of God's pecu- 
liarities. We do not see processes. He constructs 
the machinery of event as we make clocks, with all 
the pinions and axles packed in behind the dial-plate. 
We see the pendulum swing, but do not think of it 
as result, because we do not see the weight that, with 
cunning indirection, is all the time pulling at the pen- 
dulum. So with the workmanship of God generally. 
Processes are hidden ; only results lie out in the clear, 
and those altogether minute and gentle. We do not 
see the sun in its moving nor the Spring in its com- 
ing, nor the Autumn in its deepening, nor the corn 
in its yellowing ; nor do we hear the leaven as it taps 
at each little particle of the meal and wakes it into 
life. We must be careful and not underrate the in- 
fluences that work without show or noise. The un- 
seen and the unheard really make out a good deal 
more than half of the universe. 

Besides this, it is to be noticed that there are effects 
produced that really compose part of the coming of 
the kingdom of heaven without their being reckoned 
by us as such. Prophecy gets fulfilled without our 



206 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

knowing it. Some as John the Baptist came, and 
only later, did people know that in his coming was 
fulfilled the prophecy that Elijah should come. It 
is said sometimes that there is less religion than once ; 
churches not so well filled ; less distinctively religious 
life. And, indeed, it would be well if our appointed 
services had somewhat more heed given to them. 
But that is only part of the case. The time will come, 
I suppose, when men will attend church less than 
they do now. In the New City come down from 
God we are told there is to be no temple for them to 
go to ; no temple, no Sunday, probably. I am not 
aware that Christ ever enjoined it upon men to go to 
church. Church-going is means, not end. I would 
do everything to encourage the habit, for at present, 
at any rate, I do not know of anything that would 
take the place of it ; still, it is only good for what it 
will effect. 

Christianity is not a matter of places and days, rites 
and observances ; it is a matter of having the leaven 
of God so work in us that we shall be gentle as God 
is, and pure and unselfish and sympathetic as God is. 
Christianity is not a religion in the sense in which 
that word is ordinarily taken by us — a system of ob- 
servances and pious usages. Christianity is a matter 
of becoming at heart just such an one as Christ was. 
And men have made at least a commencement to- 
ward becoming so. It is not natural for men to de- 



THE HIDDEN LEAVEN. 207 

vote their time to others* interests. But more and 
more time is being devoted in this way, and money 
too, which means that the kingdom of heaven is gain- 
ing a closer and closer grip upon us : the kingdom of 
heaven is coming. Men are sorry for the distressed 
and try to relieve them. Why, that is Christianity. 
We know that we love God because we love the 
brethren. And this sort of Samaritan expenditure 
is being made in grander and grander munificence. 
Churches help it, Sunday-schools promote it, but the 
great fact we have to look at and stay ourselves upon 
gratefully is, that men are more human than they 
were two thousand years ago ; and that really is what 
the Church and the Gospel are being worked in pur- 
suit of, not to make men divine, but to make them more 
human, with a larger human heart, and broader hu- 
man sympathies and warmer human loves. " All the 
law is fulfilled in one word, thou shalt love." And 
that is what the world certainly has been getting. 
" Not as though we were already perfect." There is 
knavery, selfishness, uncleanness of all sorts and de- 
grees. Yet the leaven is certainly working, and such 
a review of the centuries as has been suggested makes 
it clear, to the point of demonstration, that the will 
of God is being increasingly done, and especially that 
the ideals of gentleness, mutual interest, reciprocal 
sympathy, with which the Gospel is so thickly strewn, 
are being growingly realized. 



208 THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

And now, dear friends of this church and congre- 
gation, we stand confronting another year of duty and 
privilege in this respect. The relation in which we 
all stand to one another means that we want that this 
leavening work should be still farther prosecuted in us, 
and means at the same time, I am sure, that we want 
to be used of God as instruments for promoting this 
leavening process in the world about us and at large. 
We have no unreasoning ambition in the matter ; we 
do not expect to work any startling revolutions ; it 
does not occur to us to attempt any great thing. It 
is not by such strides that the will of God is effected. 

The kingdom comes as the morning comes. The 
kingdom comes as the Spring comes, drop by drop 
loosening itself from the hard embrace of the Winter. 
And I know no better petition to offer, in view of the 
multitudinous opportunities that throng the coming 
months, than to pray that we may have faith in God, 
faith in the future, and faith in the meaning of every 
smallest word and most inconspicuous deed that He 
may lay it upon our tongues and hands to utter and 
perform. It has been very aptly and gracefully writ- 
ten by Mrs. Preston : 

From his home in an Eastern bungalow, 

In sight of the everlasting snow 

Of the grand Himalayas, row on row, 

Thus wrote my friend : 

" I had traveled far 



THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 209 

From the Afghan towers of Candahar, 
Through the sand-white plains of Sinde-Sagar ; 

" And once, when the daily march was o'er, 
As tired I sat in my tented door, 
Hope failed me, as never it failed before. 

" In swarming city, at wayside fane, 
By the Indus' bank, or the scorching plain, 
I had taught, — and my teaching all seemed vain. 

" No glimmer of light (I sighed) appears ; 
The Moslem's fate and the Buddhist's fe^rs 
Have gloomed their worship a thousand years. 

" For Christ and His truth I stand alone 
In the midst of millions ; a sand-grain blown 
Against yon temple of ancient stone 

" As soon may level it ! Faith forsook 
My soul, as I turned on the pile to look ; 
Then rising, my saddened way I took 

" To its lofty roof, for the cooler air ; 
I gazed and marveled ; how crumbled were 
The walls I had deemed so firm and fair ! 

" For wedged in a rift of the massive stone, 
Most plainly rent by its roots alone, 
A beautiful peepul-tree had grown ; 

" Whose gradual stress would still expand 
The crevice, and topple upon the sand 
The temple, while o'er its wreck would stand 

" The tree in its living verdure ! Who 
Could compass the thought ? The bird that flew 
Hitherward, dropping a seed that grew, 



2 1 o THE HIDDEN LEA VEN. 

" Did more to shiver this ancient wall 
Than earthquake, war, simoon, or all 
The centuries in their lapse and fall. 

" Then I knelt by the riven granite there, 
And my soul shook off its weight of care, 
As my voice rose clear on the tropic air. 

" The living seeds I have dropped remain 
In the cleft ; Lord, quicken with dew and rain, 
Then temple and mosque shall be rent in twain." 






XV. 

THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN. 

" While we look not at the things which are seen, 
but at the things which are not seen. For the 
things which are seen are temporal, but the 
things which are not seen are eternal." — 2 
Cor. iv. 18. 

" THINGS," recurring four times in our text, is 
a broad word, — gives much of room for us to 
move around in; yields points without number at 
which thought and experience get readily reached and 
easily touched. I pray that with so much of ampli- 
tude encompassing us we may not err from the way, 
but be guided of God to such a use of our verse as 
shall work in us that same sobriety and quietude of 
life which it was the aim of the apostle in writing the 
verse, to have procured in the temper of his Corinth- 
ian readers. 

Living in the things which are not seen. There is 

something a little embarrassing in the statement of 

such a theme. I should be glad if I were assured 

that the statement of it had not already excited just 

a little half-unconscious opposition on the part of 

(211) 



212 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

some of us who have listened to its statement. There 
is a difficulty lying directly at the door of the matter 
which we shall do best to confess, and to obviate if 
we can. We have been occupied with the things that 
are seen all the week, most of us, and very deeply in- 
terested in them. And this coming week's experience 
will, in this respect, be for the most part a repetition 
of last week's, most likely. Things seem ordered in 
that way. There is a great deal that is material and 
palpable about life. Seen things appear to compose 
necessarily a large share of the objects of our regard, 
and the aims of our pursuit. The senses are acute, 
and are made so because life in so considerable a de- 
gree depends upon them for its success. Now I do 
not want to appear to arraign the existing order of 
things. We never grow up into a better estate by 
having fomented discontent with the estate we are in 
now. " I have learned in whatever state I am, there- 
with to be content. " Contentment with to-day's lot 
makes candidacy for a better lot to-morrow. Dis- 
paraging the earth does not qualify us to enjoy 
heaven. I do not want to seem to preach an imprac- 
ticable religion^ to preach a finer order of things on 
Sunday than it is going to be suitable or possible for 
us to live on Monday. 

In contemplating a verse like that before us, we 
must not leap to too high conclusions in regard to its 
scope. I do not understand that Paul would have 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 213 

the Corinthians break with the solid and palpable en- 
vironment in which by birth and Providence they had 
been placed. We do well always to let ascertained 
facts work correctively against all lawlessness and 
flightiness of interpretation. Paul was writing here 
to men that worked ; he preached to people whose 
life, nine-tenths of it, was made up of seeing and 
handling, and rendering service that was a good deal 
of it quite ordinary and coarse. In some instances 
his hearers had allowed Christian doctrine to produce 
in them morbid indifference to common affairs and 
occupations, and the apostle took instant occasion to 
rebuke them, to put them upon going back to work, 
laboring with their own hands, and getting a living 
by earning it fairly and manually. 

Our text, then, let me assure you, has not been 
selected as teaching any lesson that is not easily and 
perfectly reconcilable with the sensuous constitution 
of the world in which we are domiciled, or the 
urgency of the times in which with busy eyes, atten- 
tive ears, and laboring hands we are set to perform our 
part. I understand it to be the supreme object of 
preaching to show us how we can at the same time be 
both righteous and busy, and how we can live heaven- 
ly lives while standing down upon the ground, among 
things that are earthly. 

"The things which are not seen." It is to our ad- 
vantage even to think it over distinctly to ourselves 



214 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

sometimes that there are things besides those that we 
can see; that the universe does not stop with our 
horizon ; that a thing may exist and be very real, and 
perhaps be very near too, without our having seen it, 
without any one's having seen it. Our common every- 
day duties do rather naturally draw our thoughts 
away from such reflections and queries. Our thoughts 
are like tired birds that perch on the tree that is 
next, and the branch that bends nearest to the 
ground. We can broaden ourselves by our occupa- 
tion, or we can narrow ourselves to it; the latter is 
the easier. It is for the comfort of the man with a 
lowly calling, though, that Hugh Miller became a 
geologist through first having been a stone-mason. 
Still, as a rule, we grow far or near sighted according 
to the distance of the objects we survey. We deter- 
mine our employments, but our employments do a 
good deal to determine us. Men in the dark not only 
do not see, but forget how to see. Besides this, it is 
not so much the habit just at present to make as 
great account of unseen things. There is an element 
of style about our thinking as there is about our dress 
and furniture. The general drift and fashion of 
thought to-day is in the direction of things that are 
reducible to lines and can be treated arithmetically. It 
is all expressed by saying that " science " this year 
means " physical science. " 

Still we do sometimes in our leisure moments, all 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN. 215 

of us, think it out quite distinctly to ourselves, that 
a thing may exist, and be very real, and perhaps be 
very near too, without our having seen it, with- 
out any one's having seen it. That is a small be- 
ginning, but it is a prolific seed, and will yield a 
good deal if it be well taken care of and affection- 
ately nourished. And these unseen things do some 
of them get so built into the structure of the world, 
and so entered into the composition of our minds 
that we never can succeed in quite denying or ignor- 
ing them. We do not see them, and yet, shall I say, 
we somehow have a sense of their presence. I do not 
know how better to say it. 

Let us consider two or three instances of this. 
We have the word " truth." I do not know what 
the word means. The term is as luminous in itself 
as it could be made to be by any amount of light 
thrown upon it. I can not define it ; neither can 
you, if you will allow me to say so. And yet it 
answers to an unseen something which I have a sense 
of whenever I see the word or hear it sp®ken. And, 
judging from appearances, it answers to something 
which we have all of us about the same sense of. 
And it is no mere subjective affair ; it is not a bare 
conceit of ours. We none of us suppose that. A 
thing is not true because a few men a long time ago 
came together and voted to have it true. Truth is 
something that was in the universe when we entered 



216 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 



it, before we entered it, before any man entered it. 
It shone down upon an empty world, as the sun 
beamed upon an untenanted world on the fourth 
day. It was a silent luminary away back there in 
the old ages when the morning stars sang together. 
We are born into its regime. We find the truth and 
feel it, but do not make it. It is an unseen thing, 
but it is a factor in every day's thinking and feeling. 
Everything gets tested by it. You may think how 
much it is, by trying to conceive what the remainder 
would be if it were subtracted. It is one of the 
things which are not seen, and is like the true vertical 
in archictecture, which no one has seen, and yet every 
wall along all these streets has its posture determined 
by it, and every beam and stud set plumb with its 
requirements. 

Another such unseen reality is " the right." The 
right is some like the truth, and yet very unlike it. 
All our languages have the word in them. It is a 
necessity of speech, because it is a prior necessity of 
thought and of feeling. We can talk a good deal 
about it, and yet can not say much about it. It is 
not a thing to be stated, the right is not ; it is made 
less by being formulated. It exists independently of 
all opinion concerning it, as the heavens suffused the 
earth with stellar splendor before ever there were 
eyes to pasture upon that splendor. One thinks this 
to be right, another that, but the criterion to which 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 217 

all is brought to be tested antedates thinking. All 
language and law implies as much. The right is 
something whose mysteriousness expands itself be- 
fore us the more thought strives to steal the secret 
of its quality or of its dimension. The right is not a 
co-nventional matter. It is not a product of any 
legislation, but is the postulate underlying all legis- 
lation. The Ten Commandments did not make right. 
Right was hoary when the granite was young upon 
which the Lord wrote the Ten Commandments. The 
right is not a matter of expediency ; thought climbs, 
not stoops, when it wrestles with the problem. It is 
expedient to do what is right, but it is not in the 
same sense right to do what is expedient. The right 
is not a thing that you can teach a child. He will 
learn from you that it is right to do this, and right to 
do that ; but by some discipline we can not relate, 
there becomes in him a sense of the right itself. 
The mystic judge is upon the bench before ever 
behaviors are summoned before him for arbitrament. 
The right maintains its noiseless and invisible exist- 
ence, though no man were on earth to do right or to 
think it. It is in the universe and of it, as when you 
pluck the vegetation from the ground and remove 
the upper soil, you still find the uncovered loam at 
once dressing itself with verdure again, whose germs 
were only sleeping somewhere till the moment of 

their opportunity. Crowd your inquiry as hard and 
10 



218 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

far as you will, you still find the fact receding before 
you, and retreating further into mystery the more 
closely you pursue it. It was this, I suppose, that 
made Kant say, that the right was one of the two 
things in all the universe that overwhelmed him with 
awe as he thought upon them. 

Still like this is another unseen reality, which keeps 
intruding into our thoughts and working inside our 
lives, which we call the divine. I prefer to keep to 
that word here, the divine ; it is broader ; it is not 
embarrassed by certain associations with which we 
might just now find the word "God" inconveniently 
fraught. And here language is more beggarly, and 
description more impotent than ever. No man hath 
seen it at any time ; another of the " unseen things," 
then. It would be hard estimating the work being 
done among the philosophies, moralities, and worship 
of men to-day by the presence and pressure of this 
unseen thing, this "divine." I believe that it is 
tremulously active in almost all the thinking that 
men do, and that it works as a quiet agent deep 
down at the hidden spring of almost all interior 
event. This is not a matter to be disposed of in 
sharp lines and acute angles. I mean by " divine " 
here only that unseen something which instantly 
becomes to you real when any word that symbolizes 
it is seen or heard by you. You are familiar, I pre- 
sume, with the oft-quoted stanzas of Tennyson : 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 219 

" If e'er when faith has fall'n asleep, 
I heard a voice, ' Believe no more '; 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the godless deep ; 

" A warmth within the heart would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And, like a man in wrath, the heart 
Stood up and answered, ' / have felt J " " 

That is as precise as will be to our advantage. 
This unseen thing may be variously named, and still 
be constant and identical in its denotement. Differ- 
ence of phrase and nomenclature must not betray 
us into hastily indicting our neighbor for atheism. 
My neighbor's atheism may prove on examination 
to be only my theism arrayed in a different garb, 
and colored with a different complexion from mine ; 
and if I get close to the real inwardness of my neigh- 
bor's life, I shall, perhaps, surprisedly discover that he 
is living just as much as I, under the sway of that 
unseen thing that I, with a little flippancy, possibly, 
call " God." Some agnosticism is atheism substan- 
tially ; some of it is moral irresolution ; some of it is 
piety that is languid and tired. Some of it is better 
than either of these — devotion that is diffident. Paul 
said something on Mars Hill that may serve us as 
model. He called Athenian agnostics not atheists, 
but blind worshippers, ignorant worshippers. A man 
may be a diffident devotee, and still the power of 
the Great Unseen tell upon him with intense effect. 



220 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN. 

Much is to be said in his behalf. It is vastly better 
to stand modestly at the gate of the outer court than 
to crowd into the holy of holies, and play with the 
Shekinah and eat off of the mercy-seat. There are 
men, too, whose sense of the divine seems never to 
get beyond loyalty to the demands of duty. It is a 
fair question whether duty — the right — is anything 
less than one form under which God gets appre- 
hended by us, and whether loyalty to the claims of 
duty is not in effect loyalty to God that has not yet 
quite gotten to the point of understanding itself. 
That I put in the form of a question only ; but there 
is no question about this, that it is better to be 
dominated by the right, and to do right, and call it 
morality simply, than to pray to God, take in our 
hands the symbols of the body and blood of the 
Crucified One, call it religion, and then go out and 
lead lives that are selfish, knavish, or profligate. It 
is better to get no further than morality, than to get 
to religion by dint of skipping morality. 

These, then, are instances of the things which are 
not seen. Others will readily occur to you. There 
are two or three things that we will take the time to 
say about this class of facts. 

It is the unseen things that really give their mean- 
ing to the things which are seen. A man who studies 
the universe without his thought outrunning his eye, 
and his heart distancing his thought, is like a child 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 221 

who fumbles over the letters in his primer without 
drawing an idea from the word in which the letters 
meet or an inspiration from the sentence in which 
the words combine. Even science has to forget itself 
and read between the lines and irrigate a Sahara of 
visible details at the fountains of the unseen, before 
the furrows are juicy enough to plant or prolific 
enough to harvest. The body takes its beauty from 
the invisible spirit that is sheathed in its features of 
expression and organs of action. The single life 
gains meaning and becomes worth living because of 
the subtile threads by which it is bound into the 
general life and the silken meshes that make it part 
and piece of the fabric universal. This earth of ours 
is interesting because inaudible messages flash be- 
tween it and the farthest star, and because it moves 
in rhythmic tread with all the flashing host that 
throng the ethereal plain. History first draws to it- 
self our interested regard, because it bends upon an 
invisible axis, and because its events are spelling out 
in forever lengthening lines the wisdom, power, and 
tenderness of God. Each smallest thing everywhere 
and always wins character and grace from the ties 
that relate it to the distant and unsounded, as the 
bay is tremulous with the tide that throbs out in the 
bosom of the sea. 

These unseen things which so enter in and gird up 
the body of nature, history, and event, are not mat- 



222 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

ters upon which we can discourse easily and fluently. 
A part of the power and charm of them is in their 
very reticence. The mind is held only by that which 
it can not itself hold. It is what we can not analyze 
that fascinates us. Right reduced to lines would have 
little power to sway us. God understood would be 
God no longer. Immortality that could be put in a 
sentence would be drained of its inspiration. Men 
who have creeds that they can think to the end of 
may have a form of godliness, but with a denial of the 
power thereof. No truths stimulate and uplift like 
those which throng the borders of vision, as the sun 
never seems so large as when it hangs upon the edge 
of the horizon. It is a strange and deep sense that 
puts us in relation with the unseen. It is not need- 
ful that we name it, but it is a sense. What we do 
not discern, but only feel, plays upon the soul with 
a power of effect to which definite knowledge is a 
stranger. When in the still night a meteor flashes 
into our sky, it is not the meteor, but the sudden con- 
tact in which we are held with the vast unknown of 
time and space that overwhelms us with awe. The 
most impressive part of truth, of holiness, of God, of 
life, is where it leaves the lower air and begins to spire 
up invisibly into the upper. 

And it is arranged that the unseen things should 
be continually giving to us hints of themselves. 
Things have been so shaped and placed as to set us 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN. 223 

continually upon looking off from the ground. Every- 
thing takes the form of a finger pointing wonderingly 
toward the unknown. Hints are continually fall- 
ing. The imagination is a seer ; the conscience is a 
prophet. The universe is as large and full as the 
heart, and the courage we have to open ourselves to 
it and be filled by it. The world grows larger as the 
eye grows larger ; the world grows warmer as the 
heart grows warmer. Mind, heart, conscience, spirit 
are all strung to be played upon by the airs that come 
from afar. All great advance has been made by stand- 
ing on the outermost rim. A little way up from the 
ground the currents are always moving. The light 
that has been flying for a thousand years will flash into 
your eyes to-night if you will stand out under the stars. 
Nor is there need of great striving and straining 
in the matter. All this is as easy as for the sweet^ 
singer of Israel to lie out among the sheepfolds 
and draw the messages of God from out the night- 
sky over Bethlehem. These things may be reticent, 
and yet will come into a very pleasant intimacy with 
the man who wants them and leaves himself open to 
them. It will always come readily enough without 
our stepping off the line of our vocation. You re- 
member that it was when the disciples were fishing 
that they found their Lord. It was when Saul was 
out looking after his father's asses that he gained a 
kingdom and received from the prophet the oil of 



224 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

anointing. Elisha was plowing when Elijah passed 
by him and cast his mantle upon him. Jacob was 
journeying when he encountered the angels ; and Saul 
of Tarsus, too, was on his journey when he obtained 
the revelation of Jesus Christ. And we want the 
unseen things of God to come into the same easy 
working relation with our lives. We do not feel 
required to disown or discard the things that are 
seen, but to use them rather as we use field-glasses, 
that the things which are not seen may be made near 
and visible to us. We must look at these visible 
things, but in such a way as that in looking at them 
we shall at the same time be looking through them. 
You know how we can so regard the tender flower at 
our feet, as at the same time to be learning deep 
lessons of the sun by whose delicate pencils of light 
•its petals have been painted. The sky and the ground 
have been in that way placed near to one another, and 
the echoes keep passing to and fro between them. 
The smallest drop shows the tidal play of the moon 
upon it ; the minutest atom is pulled upon by the 
gravitation of all the stars. 

And just in this we find a clue to the safe and just 
regard in which are to be held the seen things which 
surround us and occupy us. The material comfort 
that drops into our life, we can look at it, feed only 
upon it, and surfeit ourselves with it, or we can use 
it as a telescope through which the beneficence of 



THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN. 225 

God will become a near fact to us, and produce in our 
hearts stirrings of gratitude toward the kindly heav- 
enly Giver; not losing the things that are seen, but 
gaining by their help a sense and holy experience of 
Him that is the unseen. When a deed comes to us 
to be done, we can chafe at its pressure and be thrown 
by its burden, or we can look through the deed, de- 
tect the divine pleasure of God by means of it, feel 
upon us the gentle compulsion of holy duty, and so, 
without taking ourselves out of the sphere of lowly 
secular tasks, be at the same time impressed afresh 
with a sense of the nearness of God's will to us, and 
the abundance of His strength in us. Such is the 
secret of living heavenly lives while standing down 
upon the ground among things that are earthly. In 
this way we can seek and acquire secular wisdom, and 
not have the acquisition obstruct, but promote rather 
God's revelation of Himself to our mind and heart. 
We can seek and acquire wealth, and our life not be 
drained of its juices by the pursuit, but our heart be 
made more mellow and luscious every day in devout 
gratitude toward the Great Unseen, from whom 
cometh down every good and perfect gift. We can 
look at the window-pane or we can look through it ; we 
can look at the telescope or we can look through it ; 
we can stoop and examine the flower and see only 
the flower's own beauty, or we can feel the presence 
of the sun in its graceful pencillings, and so be re- 



226 THINGS SEEN AND THINGS NOT SEEN 

minded of the solar fountain of earthly beauty. We 
can look at the sea, and discern only the waves that 
ruffle its surface, or we can look into the sea, and in 
its thoughtful depths see glistening the star-studded 
firmament by which we are overarched. 






XVI. 

THE LIFE THERE CONTINUOUS WITH 
THE LIFE HERE. 

" I go to prepare a place for you." — John xiv. 2. 

THERE is almost no week that passes, but some 
member or household of our congregation is brought, 
by the dispensations of life, to feel its especial need 
of the consolations of God and the comforts of His 
heavenly word. Upon a mind in such posture, an 
exhibit of the exactions of God falls always as a chill 
and a blight. Not that we would step aside from 
the path of God's requirements, but there are moods 
of mind in which requirement is not the thing which 
really touches the soul's deepest and tenderest need. 
Our Lord found very many things in His disciples 
that merited rebuke, and that on suitable occasion 
received rebuke ; and yet He that needed not to 
be told what was in man, and who knew that there 
are in the heart bruises that need to be healed, as 
well as stains that need to be cleansed, was continu- 
ally saying to those disciples, " Let not your heart be 
troubled/' 

My friends, I never realized until coming to you, 

(227) 



228 THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE, 

a congregation composed of so many households, 
how frequent a visitant upon the earth death is ; how 
much of uncertainty, and of painful possibility, all 
our days and nights are freighted with ; with what 
frequency the tenderest expectations falter, the dear- 
est plans break, and the fondest hopes droop into 
disappointment. 

These vacancies, that quietly and stealthily, week 
after week, are being created in our pews, — others 
can come in and sit in their places, but that does not 
destroy the vacancies. There are niches that only 
one figure can fill. A vacancy indeed is sometimes 
so intense as to be almost personal — the empty place 
at table, the vacant room, the empty chair at the 
hearthstone. And so these vacancies in our church, 
that are so real, and, as it were, so personal, and that 
week by week add their little increment of dearness 
and holiness to the sanctuary itself that we pray and 
worship together in — all these tell us a story, are a 
continual presence, and voiceless reminder. And so 
our resort at this time is to the Scriptures as a volume 
of comfort. 

There is in general literature and in current speech 
so much in recognition of a better life, and a more 
restful and holy one, that we forget sometimes that 
the fertile ground of all such expectation, and the 
fruitful fountain of all such consolation is the Gospel. 
We know of no one else but Christ that has brought 






THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 229 

life and immortality to light ; so that any just dis- 
course of consolation must needs begin with Christ ; 
"/go to prepare a place for you." 

The Christian doctrine of immortality is not a sur- 
mise ; it is not an inference from certain facts and 
appearances in nature that happen to look in that 
direction ; it is not a wish pushed to the point of be- 
coming an opinion. The doctrine of immortality was 
first a fact in the life of our divine Lord, and we are 
entered into participation in that fact because of our 
participation in the divine Lord. We are not going 
to be immortal because Christ decides that He will 
make us so ; we are not going to be immortal, we are 
immortal, and that because there is something in us 
that can not die, something that is not amenable to 
the administration of death. 

It was not a strange thing — there was no miracle 
in it — that Christ escaped the confinement of the 
grave. As Peter said in his address at Pentecost, " It 
was not possible that He should be holden of it "; and 
after the outward tokens of decease Christ continued 
to live, not because God made Him live, but because 
it was not in His being to do anything but live. So 
that the meaning of Christ's emergence from the 
grave is less that Christ then and there fought out a 
victory over death — that is not so much the meaning 
of it as that there was nothing in the grave that made 
any struggle on Christ's part necessary. " It was not 



230 



THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 



possible for Him to be holden of it." Said Christ, 
" No man taketh My life from Me, but I lay it down 
of Myself : I have power to lay it down, and I have 
power to take it again." 

You rise from your couch after a half-hour's nap ; 
the couch and the sleep of it were powerless to harm 
you. Chrises bed of hollowed rock, hard by the cross, 
was in just the like way impotent to harm Him. That 
is what the resurrection of Christ demonstrates, — 
that there is a kind of life that death and the grave 
can not do anything with, can not handle it, nor do 
its pleasure upon it, nor in any way obstruct or em- 
barrass it. So our own immortality as Christians 
accrues to us not because in each several instance 
Christ robs the grave of its power, but because of our 
acquirement of that divine nature and divine life 
that moves along in imperturbed indifference to the 
death-power and at a sublime remove from its low 
contact. We are not immortal because Christ exer- 
cises over death an arbitrary veto, but because death 
works at one level, and you and I, as sons of God in 
Christ, live at another level. " Because I live, ye 
shall live also." The one fact draws the other fact 
in its train. My immortality is the immortal Christ 
in me. That is the Christian doctrine of immortality, 
so that death means no more to me, if Christ lives in 
me, than it meant to Christ himself. That is the 
point in Christ's address to Martha, " Whosoever 
liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." 



THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 2 3 1 

Now there is a volume of comfort in that, and 
each chapter in the volume has its own special cap- 
tion of consolation. It shows us in the first instance 
how we are to get rid of the fear of death ; it shows 
what it is that is " to deliver us who through fear of 
death are all our lifetime subject to bondage. " 

It needs not to be said with what constancy this 
dread does insinuate itself into our thinking, and how 
it lies as a dark thread in the strand of all our antici- 
pating and forecasting. I think it was part of Christ's 
plan and purpose that all this shadow of foreboding 
should be taken off from us, and that we should live 
and walk out under the light with no fleck of appre- 
hension to intercept the clear shining of our heavenly 
hope. If we w T ill stand in imagination on the other 
side of Christ's tomb, and observe the facility with 
which His spirit moved through the frowning portal, 
and then, in addition to that, can only have the 
actual sense that that same Christ is an abiding pres- 
ence and life in us, why, then, because He is undying 
we must be undying. Our souls by being the tene- 
ment of Christ become seasoned with the power of 
the living endlessness of Christ. As Christ said in 
His own prayer to the Father, " This is life eternal " 
(not is going to be), " this is life eternal, that they 
might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ 
whom Thou hast sent." " Christ in you the hope of 
glory," said Paul, writing to the Colossians. 



232 THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 

Of course the body is interfered with by death ; 
so was Christ's body ; but that, as we learn from 
Scripture, worked no interruption in His being, in 
His living, or in His acting. And, after all, it is not 
the mere shuffling off of the mortal coil that dis- 
turbs you and me. We are accustomed to dying, in 
that sense of the term ; we die a little every day. 
But our apprehension is of death as something which 
brings us to a pause. 

Now that apprehension no argument, no analogy 
of nature, ever relieves us from. There is no escape 
from the foreboding except as we have a conscious- 
ness of something within us that has about it the 
very property of deathlessness. And just that con- 
sciousness, my hearer, in our hour of high access to 
God, we sometimes do have, and there is in us a 
deep, full sense that we can not die, because there is 
in us, and of us, something to which death has no 
relevance. My friend, it is only by having within us 
something which is immortal, and having it in such 
fulness that it lies a great wealthy fact in our con- 
sciousness that we are delivered from the bondage of 
fear, and are set in the pleasant prospect of the things 
that are coming. 

And then with that fear gone, the present and the 
future become at once married to one another in 
pleasant alliance. This doctrine, that the soul is im- 
mortal because bound in the bundle of life with the 



THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 233 

Lord its God, of course repeals all that harsh and 
sombre notion that the life here is islanded from the 
life there by an interval of years, through which the 
human spirit sleeps, dumb, blind, and meaningless. 

It is true, Scripture does not pronounce itself upon 
the matter with great fulness ; and yet we all remem- 
ber what passed between Christ and the penitent 
upon Calvary ; we know with what alacrity of antici- 
pation St. Paul regarded the change that awaited him, 
and with what clearness in his own apprehension of 
the matter, heavenly fruitions and earthly anticipa- 
tions lay to one another. And I have thought that 
perhaps one reason why the Gospel pronounces itself 
so sparingly upon the question is that it was Christ's 
ambition so to have the immanence of God a sub- 
stantial fact of consciousness, that all need of detailed 
comment would be quite obviated. It is a finer reve- 
lation to have an eye given for the truth, than to 
have the truth given for the eye. 

This brings the future into quite a different and 
more familiar relation to us. If we are climbing a 
high mountain path that is a little perplexed and in- 
tricate, and that winds in and out among stunted 
shrubbery, and confused and precipitous rocks ; if, 
now, in casting your eye away forward you see here 
and there a patch of path yonder lying out clear and 
level upon the trodden granite, you know how it re- 
lieves the anxieties of the climb ; and how much 



2 34 THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE, 

easier it is to thread some ravine that lies across your 
way, if in descending into it you see upon the op- 
posite slope the worn foot-marks upon which pretty 
soon you are going to find yourself stepping. 

So, as at the stimulus of this Gospel conception of 
immortality, we feel the continuity of life, and almost 
see the path dropping down a little way, at one time, 
under the cover of the foliage, but emerging into the 
light a little further on, one path through it all, drop- 
ping down into age and infirmity perhaps, and the 
death-room, but winding steadily onward and upward 
from the death-chamber back into the clear and the 
light again, and lying out there on the slopes all 
bright and sparkling with the light of God — all this, 
I say (which is but the corollary of Gospel immor- 
tality), all this makes the future easy to think of and 
pleasant to muse upon. 

And then there is vast comfort in it, too, when we 
stand, as we are so often standing, by the side of 
those who are just going on before. Perhaps you 
have stood upon the wharf when a steamer that car- 
ries a friend of yours puts out to sea. You watch 
the receding figure of your friend, and the fading 
outlines of the vessel till all becomes blurred, and 
the veil of distance which enwraps the vessel answers 
back perhaps to the mist that gathers in your own 
eye. And you turn and thoughtfully wend your way 
back home ; your thoughts go out after him and his 






THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 2 3 5 

come back to you ; they meet and pass, but do not 
salute. No means of interchange. And through the 
still evening you think ; and through the still night 
you think. There is one thing that comforts you. 
You can not quite picture where he is, you can not 
tell how he is ; but there is one thing that your heart 
fastens to ; you know that he is ; he is. It is not 
much, but, when it is all, it is a good deal. He is. 
He has a mind, and he has a heart. And just this 
instant when you are thinking, he is thinking — some- 
where : just this moment when you are loving, loving 
him, he is loving, perhaps he is loving you. 

But your sainted friend, my mourning hearer, has 
gone on a longer voyage ; you have no chart from 
which to infer the course upon which he sails— she 
sails. You watched her retreating spirit, and her 
fading presence till all became blurred, and the mist 
of obscurity gathered about her, answering back to 
the mist in your own eye. Back from the casket, 
from the mound in the church-yard, you turned and 
wended your way home. Your thoughts go out after 
her. If hers come back to you, they meet and pass, 
but do not salute. No means of interchange. And 
through the still evening you think, and through the 
still night you think. There is one thing, my friends, 
that comforts you, may comfort you. You can not 
picture where she is ; you can not imagine how she 
is ; but there is one thing that your heart may well 



236 THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 

fasten to ; you know that she is. I am not extem- 
porizing ; I am just simply treading on the line of the 
Lord's word: " Whosoever liveth and believeth in 
Me shall never die." She is somewhere. It is not 
much, but when it is all, it is a great deal. She has 
a mind and a heart ; and just this moment when you 
are thinking, she is thinking — somewhere. Just this 
moment when you are loving, loving her, she is lov- 
ing. She lives because Christ lives. She lives be- 
cause Christ lives in her. I said that all just discourse 
of consolation must begin with Christ ; and it is 
almost ended with Christ. " I go to prepare a place 
for you." 

I want to add a sentence or two about that word 
" place." I like the word ; I like the realism of it. 
Paul with all his intense spirituality had to inter- 
sperse his references to the heavenly future with 
local allusions ; so John, the apocalyptic. We can 
not afford to engraft' upon Scripture coarse interpre- 
tations, nor, on the contrary, may we handle it too 
daintily. " In my Father's house are many mansions ; 
if it were not so I would have told you. I go to 
prepare a place for you." The practical effect of 
putting too fine a meaning upon a verse is to empty 
it of all meaning. A musical string strained beyond 
a certain tension becomes unmusical. 

And so I feel it safer, as well as more satisfying, to 
take this realism, for example, just this place-idea of 



THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE. 237 

heaven, exactly as it stands, as our Lord uttered it, 
and meant His disciples to understand it. Common 
things, indeed, are quite excellent if no blemish or 
taint attaches to them. Why, this earth we live upon 
would make a very comfortable heaven, it seems to 
me, if there were no sin and no sorrow here. " I go 
to prepare a place for you." A city, John calls it, 
walled and gated. The where of the place it would, 
of course, be very idle for us to talk about. 

" I know not where that city lifts 
Its jasper walls in air, 
I know not where the glory beams, 
So marvellously fair. 

" I can not see the waving hands 
Upon that farther shore ; 
I can not hear the rapturous song 
Of dear ones gone before ; 

" But dimmed and blinded earthly eyes, 
Washed clear by contrite tears, 
Sometimes catch glimpses of the light 
From the eternal years. " 

I can hardly think of any finer, or sweeter, or more 
helpful accomplishment that a child of God can at- 
tain to in these earthly years, than to be able to 
think easily of heaven as a country into which we 
step easily when we die, and to think of death as 
the gateway through which we enter easily into 
heaven. 

There occurs in the biography of a recently sainted 



238 THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HEBE. 

servant of God (one whose whole life had been full 
of sweet communing and holy trust) this paragraph : 
"Two* or three years before his death, when inquiry 
was made of him in regard to his health, he answered, 
'Almost through/ i But how do you feel about it ? ' 
1 1 can hardly tell ' (was his reply) ; ' but as for this 
dying, about which we have always been so much 
exercised, I have come to think there isn't much to 
it/ And when, later on, the hour came for him to 
die, and his wife, in the quiet watches of the night 
asked him how death looked to him, ' Very much like 
going into another room/ was the answer." 

In the fabled story from the Persian, the sainted 
Abdallah caused these lines to be addressed to the 
friends who bewailed his death, and prepared his 
body for burial : 

" Faithful friends, it lies, I know, 
Pale, and white, and cold as snow ; 
And ye say— 'Abdallah 's dead ' — 
Weeping at the feet and head. 
I can see your falling tears ; 
I can hear your sighs and prayers, 
Yet I smile and whisper this : 
I am not the thing you kiss ! 
Cease your tears and let it lie, 
It was mine, it is not I. 



" Sweet friends, what the women lave 
For the last sleep of the grave, 
Is a hut which I am quitting, 
Is a garment no more fitting, 



THE LIFE THERE AND THE LIFE HERE, 239 

Is a cage from which at last, 

Like a bird my soul has passed. 

Love the inmate, not the room : 

The wearer, not the garb — the plume 

Of the eagle, not the bars 

That keep him from the splendid stars ! 

" Loving friends, oh rise and dry 
Straightway every weeping eye ; 
What ye lift upon the bier 
Is not worth a single tear. 
'Tis an empty sea-shell — one 
Out of which the pearl is gone. 
The shell is broken, it lies there : 
The pearl, the all, the soul is here. 
'Tis an earthen jar whose lid 
Allah sealed the while it hid 
That treasure of his treasury, 
A mind that loved him : let it lie. 
Let the shards be earth once more, 
Since the gold is in his store. 

" Farewell ! friends — yet not farewell. 
Where I go, you, too, shall dwell, 
I am gone before your face — 
A moment's worth, a little space. 
When you come where I have stept, 
Ye will wonder why ye wept ; 
Ye will know, by true love taught, 
That here is all, and there is naught." 



XVII. 
THE PERFECT PEACE. 

" Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose 
mind is stayed on Thee." — ISAIAH xxvi. 3. 

WHEN David celebrates the goodness of his divine 
Shepherd, he says, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I 
shall not want ; He maketh n^e to lie down in green 
pastures/* Pasturage we think of as a place of feed- 
ing for the flock. David thinks of it also as the flock's 
place of resting : " He maketh me to lie down in green 
pastures." "We are the sheep of His pasture." 
David had tended the flocks among the green of 
Bethlehem. In this quaint way, and by this easy 
symbolism, he tells us that his own spirit is tired and 
longs for quiet. " He maketh me to lie down in green 
pastures." The picture draws itself in a few quiet 
strokes before our own eye, or at least before our own 
heart. 

This impulse that puts us upon cradling ourselves 
in the gentleness of God, and letting ourselves be 
stayed upon His upholding arms of strength, is some- 
thing to be thought about and indulged. There is a 
(240) 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 



241 



passive side in all deep and earnest living that de- 
serves our regard. The John who has told us the 
deepest story of Christ, and given us the longest 
glimpses into the future, is the John who leaned 
upon the bosom of his Lord. It may be that the 
rapid respiration and quick pulse of our times hide 
from us in part the rich meaning and wealthy possi- 
bilities of mere resting in the Lord ; mere quiet wait- 
ing on the Lord, not attempting anything, not even 
trying to hold fast to the Lord, but only letting our- 
selves be taken hold of and stayed upon Him, being 
carried and tended and nurtured by the ministering 
Spirit of God, as a tired child yields itself trustingly 
to its mother's embrace. 

There are wants that are unmet by preaching that 
is urgent or by preaching that is nutrient. We want 
also that the Lord's house should be to us a place 
where our spirits win repose. Our need is as well of 
ministrations that are sedative. Y^u come in, a good 
many of you, from another week of distraction and 
burden-carrying. Here on the Lord's day and in His 
courts, at least, you have no desire to work. You do 
not care much to think, which is well-nigh the hardest 
of work. It may be that working the mind is as 
foreign to the purposes of consecrated time as work- 
ing the body. At any rate, there are numbers among 
you that are in no mood to hear anything that is co- 
gent and stimulating, and who would like nothing so 
11 



242 THE PERFECT PEACE. 






well as to enjoy for a little the sense of just simply 
resting in the hollow of God's great fatherly hand, 
and feeling nothing else so much as that you are 
being taken care of. 

One of our pleasantest recollections of childhood is 
that it was a time when we were confident of being 
taken care of. We took no thought for food but to 
eat it when it was put before us ; no thought for rai- 
ment but to wear it when it was provided. We went 
to sleep without anxiety ; no distraction came into 
our dreams ; we did not spend our dream-hours in 
carrying impossible burdens up interminable hills. 
It was but a moment from "good-night " to "good- 
morning," and the new day always blossomed out in 
original freshness and sparkle. And that really makes 
out a good deal of the heavenliness of childhood. 
And " heavenliness " is not a word that in this con- 
nection has been used by us unadvisedly. A good 
deal of the heaven-idea really lies in precisely that 
sense of being abundantly cared for. We call it peace, 
comfort, quiet, rest, satisfaction ; but with all this 
variety of names, about all that any of them denotes 
is just this sense of being taken care of ; stayed upon 
Him, along with the quietness of mind that flows off 
from it. I have no ambition for our service this 
morning other than that it should meet this want so 
widely felt and so infrequently recognized and an- 
swered in the ministrations of the sanctuary. Quite 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 



243 



likely we shall not go away nerved to any great or 
new exertion, except as rest is always a well-spring 
of energy and prelude to effort. It was from sleep 
that the Lord himself awoke to work the majestic 
miracle of the staying of the storm and the stilling of 
the sea. 

It is as probable we shall go away without having 
learned anything new. But there are other things of 
moment in the world beside lessons and ideas. Some 
of the passages from the Holy Word that we treasure 
most highly are those that we can read without intel- 
lect feeling itself called upon to bear much of any 
share in the reading ; what we might call quiet re- 
treats and gentle nooks of Scripture, where the spirit 
simply lets itself be played upon as the wind listeth ; 
like this twenty-third psalm, where David lets us see 
the sheep simply couching themselves among the 
luxuriance of green that was given also to be their 
nourishment. So it is my trust that the moments 
we spend together over God's Word this morning 
may be a season in which we shall let ourselves be 
lifted into the quiet enjoyment of holy time and holy 
place, and in which we shall be able to feel ourselves 
supported and stayed upon the gracious strength of 
God's fatherly arm reached forth beneath. " Thou 
wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed 
on Thee/' 

Our conceptions of heaven are moulded largely 



244 THE PERFECT PEACE. 

from present experience, so that by observing the 
colors in which we severally paint the life to come, 
we can argue down with ease and surety to what are 
our most deeply and sacredly cherished desires here 
and now. We take our present unsatisfied desires, 
conceive of them as satisfied, postpone that satis- 
faction to the future, and name it heaven ; and it is 
because there is in us such a sense of disquiet and un- 
repose that the words rest and sleep play so large a 
part in the hymnology, the Scripture, and the pro- 
fane anticipations of the great future. The poor 
man expects to be rich, the tired man expects to be 
at rest, the anxious man expects at last to be " kept 
in perfect peace." The reasoning is good, the in- 
stinct is trustworthy; the special criticism to be 
passed upon it is that it overworks the element of 
postponement, that it conjugates heaven only in the fu- 
ture tense, that it makes no provision for heaven here. 
There is nothing in the Scripture that warrants 
our finding heaven the other side of the grave, 
unless we get at the secret of heaven on this side. 
Heaven is not a place till after it is a temper. The 
ground for any expectation we may have of entering 
into heaven is the present sense of heaven's entrance 
into us, which lends large meaning to the words of 
our text : " Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace 
whose mind is stayed on Thee." To you, tired and 
distressed ones, that brings heaven close by ; heaven 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 



245 



considered as a temper, I mean ; heaven considered 
as quietness, composure, undistractedness of mind. 
It is not that we do not love to work ; we would 
want to put off going to heaven as long as we could, 
if we did not expect to be busy as soon as we reached 
there. It is not work as work, but work as some- 
thing which grinds and wrenches us, pressure that 
distracts us, responsibility that bends us down, a 
galling sense of inadequacy. We do not any of us 
mind the work, that is not what hurts or kills, and 
we could all of us live and thrive under it, if along 
with it we can only have the feeling of a divine 
staying power come down upon us, and lying as a 
kind of atmosphere around among the business, 
griefs, and perplexities of every day — an atmosphere 
that our cares and anxieties can float in and be 
buoyed up by. 

To sum it all up in a word, we want to feel that 
we are being taken care of. It is a simple way of 
putting it, but it appears to go to the end of the 
matter. There is no man of us so strong, active, or 
competent but he would like to feel that there is 
some one upon whom he can lay his cares, and so 
leave off being strained and troubled. We know we 
can carry all the load that may be piled upon us, 
if only we can depend upon somebody to carry us, 
for in carrying us it will be he really that will carry 
our load. 



246 THE PERFECT PEACE. 

However old we may be, there are certain respects 
in which we never leave off feeling just as the chil- 
dren feel. We read these gentle words of our Lord 
in the sixth of Matthew, and it is the gentlenesses of 
the Lord, that like quiet strains in music and the 
peaceful aspects of nature touch us most closely and 
deeply. We read, I say, the Saviour's words in the 
sixth of Matthew : " Behold the fowls of the air ; 
consider the lilies of the field ; do not be anxious, 
saying what shall we eat, what shall we put on? 
Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of 
all these things." However impracticable all of that 
may seem to a man who spends ten hours of hard 
work every day in pursuit of food, clothes, and shel- 
ter, yet the chapter always fulfils to us its intended 
mission when we read it, and reminds us again of the 
desire all men have to be ministered to by some one 
that is competent, and cared for by some one who 
holds us in the embrace of his affectionate interest. 

The idea of a fatherly providence chimes in with 
our desires to the degree that we have learned to 
know what our desires are. There is no spirit so 
strong or so sufficient but finds very appealing the 
invitation of the Saviour, " Come unto Me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 
I have noticed that auditors always listen with very 
intent ears to all such gracious overtures from the 
Lord. They touch the heart in that secret closet 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 247 

where its deepest longings are treasured and silently 
thought over. 

And this letting of ourselves down upon the sup- 
port of God, with all of peace that belongs and goes 
with it, is facilitated by thinking of God in His 
fatherliness and motherliness. The quietude of our 
young years was due, more than we thought of then, 
to the fact that we had a father and a mother to go 
to when we were in trouble. They used always to 
help us out of our little difficulties. When the child 
comes in from outside, the first question he is likely 
to ask is, "Where's mother ? " He may not want 
her for anything particular, but he wants to know she 
is there. Having father and mother under the same 
roof makes the child's sleep more quiet at night. 
And so among the larger difficulties that throng and 
swarm around us as we move along into older years, 
there is nothing we need so much as to feel that 
there is some one that stands to us in just the same 
relation now as father and mother used to stand to 
us years ago. That is the first idea of God we want 
to have formed in us when we are little, and the last 
idea we want to have of Him as we move out and up 
into the place prepared for us in the Father's house 
on high. The first recorded sentence that Jesus 
spoke called God His Father, and His last recorded 
sentence on the Cross called God His Father, 

I have wondered sometimes whether perhaps this 



248 THE PERFECT PEACE. 

relation that exists here between father and child is 
not for the sake of helping us all to understand how 
God is affected toward us, and in what wise and 
tender strength His arms are stretched out toward 
us in guidance and protection. It may be that there 
is no relation existent between God and man that is 
not quietly hinted at in the relation between a father 
and his boy. Christianity as an idea, begins with 
thinking of God in the same way that a true son 
thinks of his father; Christianity as a life, begins 
with feeling and acting toward God as a true son 
feels and acts toward his father. The prayer that we 
pray more than any other, and that Christ taught 
us to pray, begins with " Our Father." Christ's 
prayers were regularly addressed to God as His 
Father. That chapter in Matthew that encourages 
us not to be anxious, and not to overwork ourselves 
for food and clothes, bases itself in the same rela- 
tion : " Your Father knoweth that ye have need of 
all these things." " Your heavenly Father feedeth the 
fowls of the air; are ye not much better than they?" 
And the sustaining power of this Father-idea, is that 
it sets us down upon the same side of things where 
God is. We are not alone any longer ; as the Lord 
himself says, " I am not alone, but I and the Father 
that sent Me." Where there is the filial sentiment, 
father and son almost blend into identity : " I and 
the Father are one, " said the Lord. Perhaps that 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 249 

disputed passage means more in heavenly things than 

in human ones. I do not know. I know that a little 

fly creeping across the window-pane, looks to be a 

monstrous bird as soon as our mistaken eyes locate it 

in the air instead of upon the glass. However that 

may be, we have gotten into a great broad place as 

soon as we really feel with a deep, strong thought that 

God's fatherliness reaches clear around us, that the 

loving-kindness of our heavenly Father never falls 

out of parallelism with the line of the best human 

fatherliness prolonged. 

We will remember that father is father whether 

written with a little " f " or a capital. Heathenism 

thinks of God as a natural enemy. Christianity 

thinks of God as a natural friend, and has been trying 

for eighteen centuries to erase the heathen idea, and 

has not succeeded in rubbing it all out yet even 

amid men that say " Our Father who art in heaven. " 

We can read across from finite to infinite without 

altering our alphabet. Safe thinking here is like the 

plant which begins in a lowly way at the ground and 

works up. Home love is the first step in Christian 

love. Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for 

beginners. I wish that all the little people here, 

when they try to think about God, would begin by 

thinking of their own father, and then remember that 

what your father is to you in a man's way, God is to 

you in a great and heavenly way. That is the first 
11* 



250 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 



and best lesson you can learn either at home or in 
the Sunday-school or the church. 

Nor would I have the children in any way afraid 
of God. Although your father is so much, older and 
stronger than you, that by no means makes you 
afraid of him. He stoops down and with his strong 
arms picks you up, the wee thing that you are, and 
it is exactly because he is so strong and has a great 
hand that will wrap itself clear around your little fist, 
that you are not afraid in the least when he gathers 
you up and tosses you in the air. Nor any more 
would you be afraid of God if you could see Him. 
And indeed once He did let Himself be seen, and 
made Himself in the form of a man, and was 
called Jesus, and the little children were not afraid of 
Him, and they let themselves be taken up in His 
arms, and He put His hands upon them and blessed 
them. 

Now I want that you children should think of your 
Father in heaven in just that way. So far as His 
love and care and gentleness are concerned, He is 
so much like your father here that the one name 
" father " answers for them both. And then of 
course if God is your Father, and you are true and 
loving and obedient to Him, you are God's little son 
or God's little daughter, as the case may be. From 
that you see how you can come to Him in prayer 
and tell Him all your little wants, very much as you 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 2 5 1 

snuggle up to your father here and tell him of this 
thing, that, and the other that you would like. And 
then if you get the things that you ask God for, I 
am sure that as loving children of His you will not 
forget to thank Him for them. And if you do not 
get them, you will easily understand that it is on the 
whole better for you not to have them ; otherwise, 
of course, He would have given them to you. And 
then if you should die one of these days (and little 
children do die sometimes), you will not need to be 
in the least disturbed or put out by it, for it will only 
be going away for a little while from the one father 
you have here to the other Father you have there. 
You will never be left alone ; you will always be 
taken care of. 

And now, my older hearers, this is only a very 
simple way of telling the whole matter. Our entire 
life in all its experience becomes simplified, eased, 
quieted, when with all our weight we let ourselves 
rest down upon God's fatherliness, understanding by 
His fatherliness the combination in one of love that 
never proves neglectful, of wisdom that is never at 
fault, and of power that never falls short of its pur- 
pose. 

If now we can keep ourselves in this way stayed 
upon God, it will serve to cushion the disappoint- 
ments of life, so that we shall not get so badly bruised 
against them. It will put us upon feeling that not 



252 THE PERFECT PEACE. 

so much depends upon our plans, and therefore that 
it is neither so harmful to others, nor so fatal to us, if 
they are thwarted. A good deal of ultimate success 
is built out of preliminary failures. We sail at a good 
many different angles on the voyage, but on reaching 
the haven, I expect we shall find it the shortest course 
really upon which we could have run. A straight line 
is not always the quickest path in life, any more than 
it is upon the sea. The pendulum swings backward 
as well as forward, but either beat carries the pointer 
on the dial quietly and steadily toward the hour. 

Keeping ourselves in this way stayed upon God, 
will help us not to be anxious about the effects need- 
ing to be accomplished in the world, or about the 
meagre share we are individually permitted to have 
in procuring those effects. We become worn and 
distressed by our responsibilities. The world appears 
to progress very slowly. There is not much to show 
for the effort we severally expend. There is a half- 
concealed despair even in the very way we try to 
comfort ourselves. It is our habit to say that all we 
can do is to do the best we can, and then leave the 
rest with the Lord. We begin with ourselves, and 
end with the Lord. How much more in accord with 
the spirit of our text it would be to reverse the order ; 
leave it all with the Lord, and then do the best we 
can. We are working for Him, not He for us. To 
be anxious is a modified and concealed form of athe- 



THE PERFECT PEACE. 2 5 3 

ism. We shall never do so much, nor be so cheery 
and confident about it, as when we feel that it is a 
little of it our work in the second instance, because 
it is all of it God's work in the first instance. 

This is the only means by which we can move with 
any degree of serenity and comfort through the dis- 
tresses and bitternesses of life. The religion of our 
Scriptures is the only expedient ever discovered for 
getting along with sorrow, without either being hard- 
ened or consumed by it. The bird will endure any 
violence of storm, if only the wing of the mother 
bird be extended over it and gathered about it. " I 
will cry unto Thee," said David, " when my heart is 
overwhelmed ; lead me to the rock that is higher than 
I. For Thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong 
tower from the enemy. I will abide in Thy taber- 
nacle forever ; I will trust in the covert of Thy wings." 
We know God, and therefore we believe Him. " I 
know whom I have believed" said Paul. The faith 
we have in His dealings, rests upon the knowledge we 
have of Him. Comfort, therefore, widens as knowl- 
edge deepens. In our sorrow we shall as children of 
God be quieted by remembering that if we could see 
things exactly as He sees them, we should want 
events ordered precisely as He has ordered them. 

And if we are true sons and daughters of God, then 
we can trust Him for all the future. We shall never 
be orphaned. He will always be to us both father 



254 THE PERFECT PEACE. 

and mother. His fatherhood extends everywhere. 
His love never wears out. God is in His entirety in 
every minimum of time and of space. Though the 
child were to wake up in China or in the star Alcyone, 
he would know no fear nor think of being lost, if on 
waking he found his little hand clasped in the great 
palm of his father. So David sings in the shepherd 
psalm, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of 
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art 
with me." 

Dear Father, make us all to be Thy children. We 
are Thy children ; make us to feel that we are Thy 
children. Help us to realize the wealth and fulness 
of Thy fatherhood and motherhood, that we may be 
quieted in every disappointment, have Thy comfort 
ministered to us in all our distress, feel Thy sympathy 
folding itself around us when we are burdened, and 
the sweet sense of Thy fatherly nearness fulfilled in 
us when our tired eye at nightfall looks its last love- 
look upon the faces bent over us, and we feel the 
tightening, lingering clasp of the hands that are 
vanishing. 



n^aH 



r^. 



*'-y 






mm.. 



.Av5 














LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 514 302 2 




